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.

Just figured out a way to make it easier for people rather than having to scan the whole post to find out if what I'm writing about for the day is personal, academic or technical: one of those three words will now be written in the title of the entry.

Academic means I'm going to be writing about some social aspect of teaching, while technical means I'm describing lecture material itself.

For today I'd like to reflect on what's been going on in my two computer science subjects, and how I'm adjusting to the students' needs.

In Computer Systems Organization, where I have two lecture classes one after the other, the students are becoming interchanged.

Sometimes someone who got to school too late for the first (8am) class would just show up for the 940am class, and sometimes someone who arrived very early for the second class would sit in on the first class, and get a head start on copying notes.

This happened yesterday, where the first class' exercise was also now the second class' boardwork, so the guy who was there since the first class obviously volunteered for recitation, although it was sad that he still made a mistake in his truth table.

The only thing I have to balance out now is how to ensure that the first class gets as many examples as the second class does, which includes the board work from the first class.

In Assembly Language class, I've found new but still basic topics I can discuss without alienating (or boring) the computer engineering students who have already taken up the language before.

In our last meeting I discussed binary coded decimals, which is an alternative way of storing and computing decimals from user input.

I even joked with one of the guys (who got a 4.0 last term, and was part of the programming contest team) that he can't skip the class anymore out of a sense of deja vu, because it's something not discussed before.

Session 1987 has to find the median between students unfamiliar with the lesson and those who have taken it up before. Class dismissed.