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

In Graphics Two last Wednesday their teacher listed the grading system on the board at the start of the class. Fifty percent goes to the exercises, twenty percent to the midterm exam, twenty percent to the final exam and ten percent to work attitude, although it wasn’t called that.

The difference from last term is that there is now a minimum number of exercises they have to finish by midterms. It was set at twenty, allowing the students to finish three to four exercises per meeting. If they don’t pass the twenty exercises by the midterm week though, they will get an automatic zero for the unfinished exercises. And since I put up ten exercises this week alone that means students can finish their requirements up to the sixth week of classes right now.

I’m still not sure how many exercises I have to make to finish the whole manual of the software by the end of the term. I will still try to make ten more exercises next week, and hope that the requirement will be adjusted if there are more than forty exercises total fro the rest of the manual.

The passing was also set at seventy percent. Not that the students complained. Or maybe they just don’t want to push their luck with the new teacher (new at least, for some of them who didn’t have him as a teacher in Mathematical Methods 1 last term).

And speaking of MM1, yesterday I rushed to finish the first chapter, which was the whole coverage of our quiz today. This I accomplished by writing out all of the concepts on one third of the board first, then discussing the examples as we got to them on the remaining two thirds of the board. I had prepared several examples that I placed on a notepad already, but I didn’t discuss all of them anyway.

There was a point when the students were already audibly complaining for me to stop (instead of just judging from their nonverbal reactions), but I couldn’t grant their request or they would have been incompletely prepared for the quiz today.

What’s worse is that this first quiz is doubly important: double the coverage and double the weight of the regular quizzes, which will be held regularly every Friday from now on, with the coverage as whatever was taken up from Monday to Thursday.

I just hope that I can catch up enough that most of the Thursday class will now be a review for the quiz the next day.

That was my only lecture yesterday. Trig App and mechanics were both quizzes, the first of which I made on Wednesday afternoon to give a copy to the other teacher in Trig App, whose first quiz in fact was at the same time as my MM1 class.

As usual, a little rush causes some mistakes in the instructions, if not the wording of the problem instead. I used an earlier template for exams that did not have the instruction not to use pencils. I had to tell them that after I had passed the questionnaires and the test booklets.

I also forgot to specify the units for some of the angles they had to compute. There was also one erroneous unit in one of the six problems in the mechanics quiz.

But I’ll continue with that tale tomorrow. Class dismissed for now.