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.

I hope that when people see the Academic-slash-technical tag they don't shy away, but realize that it means only part of the post is technical, and not the entire thing so it can be scanned.

Last Friday I had my first two long exams for the term, in Assembly Language and in Computer Architecture. This, by the way, is the first time that I've handled these Computer Science majors since being their teacher in General Science requirement mechanics, mathematical methods and introduction to robotics.

Damn, I just hope these students don't see me as some jack of all trades master of none and dismiss me as having no "expertise".

Anyway, I already assumed that most of the students won't study, even though it is a closed notes and books test. But despite the fact that we had practice problems and board work the meeting before, they still found the test difficult.

In fact, they said they found it tougher than the exams given by who I believed to be their stricter major subjects teacher.

I also learned a lot of quotes the guy throws around to his class, such as "there are no easy [test] questions for someone who doesn't know anything [didn't study]" and, to describe answering random parts of the exam desperately during the last few minutes of the period, "shooting blindly in the dark".

Well, I'm still having mixed emotions about the comparison. This is, after all, a teacher who perfunctorily turns down certain major subjects because he doesn't like them - even though there is a teacher shortage and he could study it.

After all, he did pass those subjects in his undergraduate, so why decline?

And the batch of third year engineering students hold a grudge against him because, for their advanced computing class, which was supposed to be the culmination of their graphics one, two and computer aided drawing and design courses, he instead forced them to learn a website database program because that's what he likes to teach - and yet he didn't give enough lectures for the students to feel sufficiently confident about the language to make the projects he assigned.

Session 1999 doesn't know if it's flattering or condemnatory. Class dismissed.