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.

Yesterday was another milestone of reaching a millennium and a half of posts, coming so soon on the heels of the four year marker and my reflection on what else I’ve learned in the 325-odd posts a year average I have behind me.

I guess just to top off what I’ve written back then, what I’m set out to accomplish with this task is to show my students that it is possible to write about a fresh page-worth a day (or at least some regular not too long frequency) without drying up the brain, without resorting to recycling knowledge that can be gleaned from somewhere else such as writing TV show or movie synopses, or just answering quizzes one sees on other journals or receives by email, or forwarding news items from other people and just putting a short generic reaction to it that just follows the bandwidth wagon.

And I also believe that I’ve toed the line between the two extremes of “scratched my armpit all day” kind of too-much-information, and “finally confronted my boss last night, but I don’t want to talk about it” frustrating vagueness and brevity.

Since I know that when I click that mouse button, there will be people out there who are familiar with the person behind the words who will be reading this, I strive to give them enough information about the goings-on in my life right now for them not to worry or feel shortchanged, and find any need to ask me to clarify afterwards, either face to face or by other electronic means.

And with that, in my general science requirement mechanics classes recently, I gave them the results of their first exam, where roughly half of them were below the sixty percent mark. Before I distributed the papers though, I gave them the answers and told them about the common mistakes that I saw in the exam, such as the very basic one of assigning 100 meters to velocity, not knowing when to use the equations for acceleration and when to use those for velocity, and basic algebraic errors.

It was a little irritating to hear Ephraim loudly exclaiming relief when I talked about giving partial points to some numbers, so that’s something I won’t be doing again.

I did assign a problem set to those who did not pass, and he kept asking if it will pull up his grade. I just repeated that it’s an additional requirement, and it will pull up his grade if he gets enough practice on them and does better in the succeeding exams that build up on the same concepts.

More about these on the next posts.

Session 1503 is happy with the partial points that comes with the partial effort put in. Class dismissed.