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

Just one minor speculation about why the grade school and high school teachers are so hostile against each other, and we college teachers are not. I think our charges are enough of a handful for us to necessitate banding together to draw strength. For them, then the immature minds they deal with are not enough of a challenge so they have to turn to (or ON) their fellow employees for mental and emotional friction.

Of course, the other extreme is also possible: that their pupils are much more of a burden than ours that they fray at the seams to anyone in sight while we are still calm and collected.

Now I’m all about the afternoon of the third day of the first week of classes for the first term of school year 2005-6.

When I went to the robotics lab (I preferred to hold my classes there not only because of the equipment being more accessible, but also because of the excess cold air from the neighboring computer lab seeping in through the ventilation shaft), after a few minutes Deiv showed up.

He spent more than fifteen minutes playing with the robots left in the shelves from the boxing tournament last term, and in fact, breaking some of them in the process – but at least along the same stress points as they did during the battle itself. I was just waiting for the batteries to run out rather than tell him he shouldn’t touch them. I also had my own time limit of when I would declare that he had no classmates and force him to reenroll in the morning class.

But he got bored before I reached that point, and asked me for what I was going to tell him in a few more minutes. At least he admitted that he did not have classes during the time of the earlier class; he just didn’t want to wake up that early.

So that’s three assigned classes of mine for this term dissolved.

When I got back to the faculty room, the Vice Dean was there and asked me if it was okay for me to handle another six hours a week of a Mathematical Methods One section. Since it is my policy never to turn down whatever they offer me (making me more valuable than those who pick and choose their subjects or students), I didn’t decline. At that point, it was considered overload anyway.

But Miss Noelle later suggested swapping that MM1 section for the Differential Equations class at the same time, which she was reluctant to handle. Something, I bet about the new younger students being easier to intimidate.

I didn’t decline either. I knew my cousin was there, or would be enrolling in that class from the other section he was in all by himself, and therefore was dissolved as well.

Besides, it’s mostly engineering sophomores, who are the same people in my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism lecture class ten minutes afterwards anyway. In fact, I could just tell them to bring their lunches to the room and eat them as we transitioned from one subject to the other.

I’ll talk about my second MM1 lecture tomorrow, the first meeting with the Differential Equations class and first INELMAG lecture.

That’s “curtains” for session 608. Class dismissed.