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.

Slacker student adjustment advice: if the teacher has any requirement of the class that has to be passed to someone else by a specific date, always make the students’ deadline one week earlier than the real deadline, because there will always be those who will claim to have heard of the need on the last day that their classmates are already paying. That way even when they are technically late, the teacher will still be on time in his or her own submission.

In fact, I (admitting that I am talking from personal experience, of course) have resorted to not replying to the students’ text messages anymore about whether they could pay beyond the deadline, when the number of inquiries reached the two-digit mark.

Too bad I couldn’t come up with any fine with late payments as I can with deductions to late submissions.

The best I could do is to threaten them about not being able to go on the field trip at all.

But then, for some of them, they could go on the field trip on their own even without the school-provided transportation or educational-trip entrance fee discount.

@ @ @

Moving on to my general science requirement mechanics lab class (again – after all, my classes meet weekly) there is a thin line that the students have to tread between wanting to finish as early as possible so that they have a larger vacant period (it is, after all, a three hour class) before their next class and having the smallest percentage error possible in their experiment.

Using the minimum number of trials given in the manual, (three) sometimes the students get a large (and they believe unacceptable) discrepancy compared to the theoretical results. But having more trials, which I allow them, brings down their error as the average approaches the theoretical value.

The truth is, the error is acceptable even when it is large (sometimes up to eight hundred percent) if they could accurately pinpoint the cause, as long as it is not human.

After all, it is assumed that they would perform the experiment as perfectly as the equipment will allow.

And even if they blame the materials or the external conditions, it still has to be detailed.

Session 1553 will never be on time for school unless it becomes a life or death situation. Class dismissed.