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

In the last Graphics One class for the term Wednesday, there were some students in the 8am class who were still surprised that it was the last day for submitting exercises, because they are way behind (still in the late thirties or something).

Finally I consented to allow them to pass the rest of the exercises on Friday without deductions, but I told them it was different from what they had to submit for that day. They still had to submit their diskette if they wanted to get scores for that last session though.

There were also a lot of students who still asked about deleting more exercises than I allowed them to last time. I told them they could remove up to exercise number twenty five (the first half) and when for one student that still wasn’t enough, I told him to just remove everything that was saved July or earlier.

What’s interesting is that I didn’t have to give the same allowance to the 11am class. I don’t know if it’s because I now come across as a little more snappish (shades of the old “Ally McBeal”) in that class because of the presence of Deiv and Dudley.

Another Deiv side track: the other day I was using the computer in the faculty room when Alain the computer programming teacher sat two terminals away and Deiv was at his heels. From the ensuing conversation I assumed that Deiv was asking Alain for the reason why his latest submission got such a low grade.

Alain told him that first of all, he’s the only one in the class who is still using one keyboard input statement to receive more than one number to bet on. Second, he does not show the results of the dice “roll” before saying whether their bets won money or not. Lastly, the most critical error of the program was that the randomization assignment was outside the repeated bets loop instead of inside. This means that after figuring out what the winning numbers are, the player can just keep betting the same numbers and keep winning.

Deiv had some counterarguments against the minor errors including some others that I didn’t mention, but not against the major error.

In another dialogue with my co-teachers, I found out that one of the English One teachers has discovered a student who is guilty of plagiarism in her movie review requirement. What I find sad is that this student, Ephraim, is one of the more diligent and analytic students in my Trigonometry class.

Makes me think about the stereotypes about students good in the science subjects as opposed to the liberal arts type subjects. Was he so afraid of getting a low score in his submission if he just typed his own opinion of the movie that he had to cut and paste one from the internet – the same way that numerically challenged students just copy the answers when dealing with problem solving type exams?

First time I’ve thought about it really. All this time I’ve been under the impression that mathematically inclined students just accept their limitations when it comes to writing essays, since they believe they already have “covered” the important aspect that they can excel in for their careers.

For the next sessions I will be talking about the electricity and magnetism lab oral reports, the last lecture session for the electricity and magnetism lecture yesterday and the goodbye dinner for two teachers leaving. We’re done for now.