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.

As I was discussing yesterday, I interrupted a certain student in the middle of a verbal proposal for his alternative project when I saw a pattern emerging from what he was saying and what he had submitted before.

First was that “use gravity pulling down a small weight three feet to power a fan blade pointed to the floor to turn for less than five seconds” monstrosity that was obviously not even made personally, besides bugging me several times about whether or not he won and what the scores of the other entries were.

Next was his “I’ll show up with another professionally constructed project on the day of the exhibit itself, THEN submit my ‘proposal’, AND, not being satisfied with that, bug my teacher about my windmill blades spinning on a vertical axis being better than the ones out there that are facing horizontally, since I believe still might win, even though he has to tend to the grade school kids.”

Some of the other teachers I talked to about it said this student has had a history of not submitting what he proposed, and that has happened to me as well.

During that most recent Interactive Science Week he was also supposed to submit a rain gauge, and he even signed up for it in the sheet I passed around.

But it never materialized, and that out-of-left-field submission showed up instead.

I had a suspicion though that this time, he suggested it because it was already something he had started paying to get made at home, so for him it would be killing two birds with one stone. I wasn’t going to allow that this time.

Besides, I am planning for their project to have it done only in the lab, with a progress report to be submitted each meeting as well as a percentage of contribution of each member rated confidentially by all involved.

If that doesn’t scare him into putting in some real effort, I don’t know what will.

Another anecdote about him is that in my Electromagnetic Theory class, he got a perfect score in the exercise for the first time in the entire term, because he borrowed the notebook of his classmate who had the highest grade before submitting, supposedly to copy the correct answer to the previous exercise.

Session 1557 just doesn’t learn how to deal with people successfully. Class dismissed.