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

Yesterday I met my two mechanics laboratory classes. One was at scheduled at 8-11am and the other was at 2-5pm.

In the first class the syllabi had not been photocopied yet (actually it had, but the secretary left it on my desk), so I just gave each group a third of a letter-sized paper where I had printed out the requirements and policies for this term.

First of all, instead of requiring each group to buy at least two lab manuals, I am only requiring them one. After all, when we designated that there be a students’ copy and a teacher’s copy, there were still students asking for the teacher’s copy because they either did not copy down the data for the individual reports they had to submit or they wanted to study for the next meeting’s quiz.

Why should they pass an entire manual in the first place when the teacher only needs the data sheets for each experiment and the answers to the guide questions they choose to answer?

So the groups are now required not to have to pass the entire manual at the end of each class session but only either the data sheets themselves (torn out of their manual) or photocopies (recommended either for those pages where there is some procedure at the back or if they want to keep their own copy of the data).

The policy of no erasures in the data sheet to be submitted still applies, which for me ensures that the group has at least one copy of their recorded measurements and computations other than the one they submit to the teacher.

For the first class there were four groups of three members each, which I think is the ideal size for the groups. I know there will be at least four more students in that class though that did not attend the first meeting, but I can’t go beyond the four available set-ups for each experiment in the lab, so those students will have to be distributed to the other groups.

As I told them last Monday in the mechanics lecture class, missing the first class means forfeiting their privilege of getting to choose their group mates.

In the second class there were only three groups of three students each.

I didn’t tell them about the possibility of the oral report, which I am reserving to announce in the middle of the term.

I also standardized that the quizzes will be ten points each, and I told them that the rotating leader and secretary assignments for each activity and/or experiment will be posted by the start of next week, since I am half-expecting that the members of at least some of the groups will be added to anyway when the adjustment period ends.

I also told them about the format for the individual reports (which don’t need to be passed anyway until the after the first experiment in four weeks time) which they could get when they pass a disk that will be used for giving a softcopy of the report they have to submit a print out of at the same time.

That’s the bell. I’ll talk about today tomorrow, if that makes any sense.