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

Last Monday after all my classes, that was when the other Trigonometric Applications teacher, who is handling two sections, said that because of the fact that there were no common times between his two classes alone, that the best time for us to have the departmental exam would be on Friday at 6 to 730 pm.

Having agreed on that we then had to ask approval from the dean and post the announcement in the hallways where all the students could see them.

In my mechanics lab last Wednesday, first we had the third quiz in as many activities. Even then, there were still students who showed up late automatically got zero in the quiz. After all, one of the purposes of the quiz is to get students to show up early.

But even among those who were able to take the quiz, there were still only a few of them who got more than fifty percent of the questions. So much for the intention of giving the quiz so that the students would go to class prepared for the day’s activity/experiment.

Maybe the outcome will be different if I posted the results of the quizzes immediately afterwards, or at least placed them inside their group folder.

Since this is the last of three activities, I already prepared them for what would happen during our experiments starting next week. Besides the usual quiz, and leader and secretary appointments there would now be people assigned to submit individual reports on certain experiments, so that there would be three experiments assigned per student.

I gave the usual deadline, a week after performing the experiment, the usual deductions (five percent per day late) and the usual incentive (five percent per day early).

I warned them though that it was five percent of the score over ten points, not five percent of ten points. So even if they passed their report on the same day as the experiment, if it was obviously rushed, and they only got one point out of ten for it, then they would get one point plus twenty five percent, which isn’t much.

Since I also told them that the format of the individual report is in a document file I could let them copy, I told them to pass a disk individually before the first report is due. They also have to give a softcopy of each report in a disk along with the printout.

I also emphasized that written reports are individual. That means even if two people in the same group are assigned the same experiment to report on, and they share the same results, they still have to write their understanding of the theory and methodology, analysis, conclusion, possible sources of error and recommendations separately, which could not possibly be exactly the same as anyone else’s.

Lastly I told them that having incomplete requirements for the class at the end of the term garners an automatic zero point zero, so they should submit all their requirements, preferably on time. But even an individual report with no score because it is extremely late and has the maximum deductions still has to be submitted.

But that’s all for today. I’ll continue the discussion tomorrow.