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

Subject: Advanced Mathematics. Meeting: First. Week: Ten. Term: Three.

We continued with their determining the properties of graphs from the software. Some of the students even forgot where we stopped last time, which was how to get the exact point or value where the signal graph crossed the x-axis.

Since the intersection appeared several times, I told them to get the one where the two functions whose sum they were graphing are both zero instead of the ones where it just becomes zero because of the two functions (one positive, one negative) cancel each other out.

It would have been faster if they looked at the tables at the same time as the graph, because all they have to determine are the two values where all three columns change sign.

I also had to remind them that to get the amplitude they have to subtract the minimum value from the maximum value.

At least now, unlike last meeting, the students were more involved with learning the topic. Now I have the confidence to give them the hands on exam next meeting, and most of them will be able to answer something – if not everything.

On to another academic matter: my students have been telling me (and some other teachers) about a certain part-time teacher in Politics and Government who has been selling them a centimeter thick sheaf of handouts for THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTY PESOS that he absolutely forbids them to photocopy. Besides that, he tells them that if they buy that “Constitutional Analysis” they will already be exempted from their finals.

In fact, I saw him carrying a big plastic bag full of those papers to his class one time that I left the faculty room right behind him.

I don’t know if I’d be able to sleep at night if I did something like that, even against my will. All my even tangentially ulterior motivated requirements have, at the very most, been bonuses, and not alternatives to major parts of their grade.

I have told the students that they should complain to the Dean directly about this, or to the current Student Council, but no one has stepped forward.

Talking to Mateo, one of the Engineering sophomores about his willingness to talk to the Dean should the matter arise, his logic goes, “Why? It’s an easy high grade. Should we turn him in for another teacher who will give us more work?”

And this is the class after my Advanced Mathematics period, where even the mettle-tested diligent and hardworking Engineering sophomores are thinking regularly of skipping the class.

I don’t think they are looking in the long term effects about the kind of reputation the school will unintentionally get with teachers like that running around unquestioned, and on them as graduates of this school.

I’ll talk about the first session of my mechanics classes for the tenth week next time, with the topic of Specific Forces, and the Talent Quest. For now, class dismissed.