Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Survived another Wednesday. It was only in the afternoon that I realized before I went home yesterday I left some books on my seat. I didn’t even sit in my cubicle all day today.

In the Graphics One class I returned their disks to them. I divided them into two piles near the whiteboard. The left pile was the one that I checked okay. The second pile was the one that had problems.

These ranged from no design files contained in the first place (although the compressed files with the instructions were there), some files that had zero byte size, files with incorrect names, and files that could not be read by any of our computers in the faculty room.

I wrote down all these problems on the board for those students to check. If it still persists after I check their new exercises, then I’ll write individual notes on the disks.

If they don’t access their back up disk anyway, all they have to do is look for the copy in the hard drive of the terminal they used last week.

I saw at least one student though who - not really saw but he admitted to me that – he just did the unreadable exercise over again.

For most of the period the students were playing catch up with the exercises they didn’t finish last time. Some students were only able to finish until number five out of the nine that I had already prepared.

Of course for some students I still had to reiterate that the procedure for obtaining the instructions of the next exercises were the same as the last time, and that again just like last week, they are not expected to finish everything for now but just complete what they can.

This is because these are just the introduction to the commands and features of the software type of exercises. At some point in the future I will have to insist that those lagging behind will have to make up for the unfinished exercises on their own time. This is to prevent the extremes I experienced during the second term teaching Graphics Two, with I think up to seven exercises spanning the fastest and the slowest workers.

I guess I can also tell those who are ahead that they have earned the right either not to attend class for a meeting or two, or at least leave early.

In my electricity lab the students gave their waiver forms, and I was able to get our alternative class approved.

We started out with ten students in two cars, where we had a predetermined meeting place near the shop we were going to buy supplies at. The second car never made it though. Mechanical trouble they said, that forced them to turn back.

The students who were with me (representing two of the three groups) were then asked to just buy for their classmates. There is no punishment for not being able to join us; they won’t be marked absent for that activity. But they will still have to solder the alligator clip connectors that we bought in time for the next experiment next week, and, they didn’t get to share in the pizza I treated the other students to.