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

Going back to my tale of Wednesday’s mechanics lab session, some groups had to repeat their performance because the ramps, just tied to the stand with a string (the gun glue that held it together – even after being spray painted silver - didn’t last), curved back up after the decline, providing them with similar results for the last two heights. So one of the group members had to make sure the ramp did not tilt while the ball was rolled.

It was also during this session that I still had some students borrowing the group data even after several warnings that they should copy the measurements before passing the records.

In fact, one of them complained that I gave him the wrong results for one of the earlier experiments he was assigned to write. Since the report would be chockfull of deductions already by the time he passed it, I just told him to write a report about that.

He said that he already typed out and printed the report for the earlier assignment, and just needed the data. That made me highly suspicious. When he passed his individual report with the group report afterwards, I studied it, and found out that the analysis was very generic, assuming more or less standard findings.

Not going into the a direct accusation of the writings having been copied, I just told the guy (and a few others who also asked for their measurements after the report had been printed) that they weren’t going to get very high marks on their analysis and conclusion – the two weightiest parts of the report. It’s the risk they will have to take with their grade.

I had to postpone my afternoon class, because it was only after 1pm that I got the request letter back from the Dean’s office (signed) that I was supposed to bring to the theme park to buy the tickets for the field trip.

They will just have to perform their experiment on Conservation of Mechanical Energy at the same time as the morning class performs Torque and Rotation at 8am on November 24.

When I passed that change of schedule for that to the Registrar’s office, I also included the free day for my Trigonometric Applications class on Thursday, because of their departmental and outside-of-class-hours exam two Fridays ago.

This was also opportune because of my hundred-point exam in my mechanics lecture on Thursday afternoon. For once, students in that class consulted from 1120am to 220pm, including David’s brother, Daniel.

While asking they were already assuming that I had already printed out the test questions and they were asking if this and that type of problem would show up. I just verbally sidestepped those inquiries. In reality I was just starting to use the same template from two terms ago that had the listing of all the formulas they were going to use, and then some.

Since I only had 20 minutes to spare before the start of the class when I finished with the consultation, I just reused the same questions from last March, just doubling the worth of each question because I got it from a fifty-point quiz. Four questions with six sub parts total.

What surprised me was that they still had difficulty with that, including previous achiever Dennis, who admitted that he had forgotten some topics already (maybe due to the fact that our last meeting was last week and the schedule for the test slipped his mind).

In fact I got so fed up with their fundamental clarifications during the test that I told them there would be a recitation at the start of the class Monday about the same concepts they were asking me.

On the other end of the pendulum, Daniel was concerned that the answers could not be as short as he believed, just taking up one page of his test booklet. Talk about extremes.

I’ll continue on this tomorrow. For now, class dismissed.