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.

In the meeting with my general science requirement mechanics lab class for the fifth week of the third term, we had the first experiment, which was on Constant Acceleration.

I returned to them their group notebooks with the grades for the graphs and equations activity the meeting before, and they got relatively low grades from the meetings before not only because of the missing labels in most of the their graphs, but also from not drawing all the required graphs in the first place.

One group, in fact, did not pass their notebook, and the person who had it was also absent, so they only had three days to look for her and pass their notebook otherwise they would get zero for that activity (at the rate of ten percent deduction per day late).

That is the problem with only one person handling the group requirements, such as the manual. If that person doesn’t show, the group will have to scrounge for materials. We could provide a group locker for all their supplies, but there is also the problem of them accessing it when the lab is closed.

Best solution is still for each member of the group to have a copy of the procedures.

The experiment was pretty straightforward, except that there were still questions about how they were supposed to solve certain quantities such as the acceleration, leading me to conclude that no one was bothering to read the procedure, which told them the equations to use, instead of just looking straight at the data tables and the blanks there.

For this I warned them that the next meeting’s quiz will be all about the procedure.

I’m also tempted to institute deductions on any questions asked of me during the session whose answers I can point out to in the procedure.

Clarifying what the procedure is asking them to do - which, admittedly, is sometimes in counter-intuitively couched language in the lab manual we are stuck with but is still the best and easiest to access that we could use - I will allow.

Session 985 didn’t bring the group notebook to the experiment. Class dismissed.