Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

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

On Thursday last week the college secretary and I agreed about how helpless we both felt about a lot of major decisions concerning the schedule, how few jobs we got done and such now that the associate dean’s new schedule means that she is only in the campus of Mondays and Fridays, not anymore Wednesdays and Fridays like last term.

Now if a not so urgent matter comes up (for example on Tuesday), we have to wait for it to be resolved a maximum of three days afterwards, not like just a two day delay before.

I, for one, had two room, time and schedule change requests “pile up” on her desk in the interim. I actually sent her the original document by email, but it bounced. I guess work is overflowing in her second (or does she consider that the first?) office as well.

Nothing to do now but gird our belts, adjust and adapt. It’s only for twelve more weeks now, including the All Soul’s Day holidays.

I will conclude my discussion of the third day of the second week of classes. In the afternoon, when the second session of Graphics Two bled from the morning into beyond lunch, I had my number two mechanics lecture meeting for the term.

Since some of the students from the earlier class were also in that course, I had given them a preview of our topic, which, I said (since it was an early, “easy” topic) if they could answer without leaving the room or asking for any help by celphone, they would be excused from that day’s meeting.

It was about a car that traveled straight east at a certain average speed at a given value of time. Two hours later somewhere along the same route a hundred kilometers from the starting point, another car begins to go in the same direction at a slower speed. The question was: at what time does one overtake the other?

They couldn’t answer it, so they had to attend. I impressed on them that for this topic of constant velocity in one dimension, I was in fact just reviewing something they had already taken up in their Mathematical Methods One, again in which some of them were my students this time last year.

I also finally got to use the exercise notebook for their practice problem at the end of the class, to save on paper as well as make it easier to compile on my part; my exercise collection from last term is more than a foot high.

But I still had to give them some hints on fraction simplification. They have to remember those, and the best way to do that is to keep solving until it sticks in the brain.

Session 773 gets overtaken here. Class dismissed.