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

In my Graphics One class yesterday I gave them the exercises numbered twenty-one to twenty-four, even though I told them they were only required to finish up to number twenty that day.

But I arrived in my eight a.m. class more than forty-five minutes late because of having to download the July license for the Bentley Microstation V8 software we’re using, as well as compressing the four files for the above mentioned added exercises.

It’s not as if any of the students would have left the computer lab in that time though, with most of them still having to work on the exercises already given up to twenty, as well as other distractions they could do on the computer while waiting.

For the umpteenth session in a row Deiv was the only student who called my attention during the session, several times. Once it was to clarify a certain instruction in the exercise document I gave them. I showed him that to answer his question, I also had to retrace the steps in the procedure with him, which I would do with other lessons.

The second time it was to ask me if a certain given illustration was how his final work was supposed to look like. When I said yes, he asked me to compare it with his work so far. “YOU do it,” I told him and walked away. It would have been a bad precedent if I did that, and all the other students asked for the same thing.

The last time he called me, it was to say that his exercise was not in the compressed file I gave. This is because for more than ninety percent of the exercises, they are used to having a starting design file along with the instructions document, that most of them open the design file first before starting to read the procedure instead of the other way around which is just my front-brained way of thinking.

In fact we’ve only had one other exercise that did not have an accompanying design file, and that was three weeks ago. So there were already students before who, after uncompressing the archive, immediately thought there was a file missing.

So yesterday I cut off Deiv’s similar complaint and said a little sharply, “If you open the instruction document you would read there that you are supposed to load a saved design file from a previous exercise.”

But enough of that; in my electricity and mechanics lab in the afternoon three out of the eleven students did not give oral reports. One, Lynne, insisted from the start of the session that she wasn’t prepared, and that she would just make up for it in the second report. I didn’t realize announcing the second report would backfire like that, but I just replied to her to try for that day.

Since the sequence of reports were random, she was also fortunate she didn’t get picked for the first seven reports (three of whom volunteered, not knowing there was a bonus for such initiative). I thought she would have used the time to prepare.

It all went downhill when the third to the last name was drawn, and the guy, Dino, who has been consistently good in the written requirements and didn’t echo Lynn’s earlier claims, also said that he wasn’t ready, to my surprise.

I wasn’t as surprised when the next student, Gino, also backed out, seeing that I was lenient with Dino, even though he was commenting earlier (apparently as a joke) on using the earlier reporters’ equations on the board and in slide presentation software on the same assigned experiment.

And, of course, Lynn already knew I wasn’t going to force her to report.

But I’m still disappointed in them. After all, this exercise was exactly brought up to address their weaknesses in public speaking.