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

First, hot news right off the press. Well, I’ve decided to go ahead with it. I’m starting my student-friendly student-safe online journal today. The site is csi.easyjournal.com.

That means anything I would have posted here that I can allow my students to read I will post there instead, and keep all my personal reactions to anything that the students do (or the administrators or my fellow faculty) - that I don’t want the students to find out about – here.

Now we return to our regular programming: on the third day of the third week of the first term of the new school year, we held our first activity in my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism lab class.

This was where the students (most of them anyway who did not go to technical high schools like I did, or are just mechanically adept and have been tinkering with electrical equipment since before college) learned to solder wires to alligator clips, which – if their work has good connections - they will be using to complete the circuits in their experiments.

For the second time that week I ran into a situation where the real world supplies cannot keep up with the exaggerated demands made by the artificially induced population of students (the first was when the bookstore ran out of test booklets the day before a quiz I scheduled).

This time it was the alligator clips. Of course, it was partly the students’ fault for waiting until the day before the deadline to go to the nearest electronics shop, so it’s no wonder the stock of the place ran out. Now if they had gone out to buy everything on the day the assignment was given or even in the intervening weekend, they would have had no such problem, because they’d have enough time to go to other stores.

So there were groups that made only five connectors or ten instead of the required fifteen. Same goes for the wires: some groups didn’t have wires at all. Good thing two of the groups that did have wire had bought the type used for electrical outlets, so there were actually two wires that could be cut down the middle.

There was also a lack of pliers, long-nosed pliers and wire cutters (as opposed to wire strippers, or which we had plenty) in the laboratory, so I asked the technician in charge to include some for use per group in his next materials requisition order.

I told them that the next activity (not yet an experiment, but their data will be recorded in their group notebooks) for the succeeding meeting would be volt-ohm-milliammeter familiarization and learning to read the values of resistors.

Session 619 is now put to rest. For now, class dismissed.