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.

Knowing that’s it’s possible that Ephraim will be my student when I teach introduction to Electricity and Magnetism Lab for the first term, I don’t know if I’ve already mentioned here that I’m planning to have them recreate the electric field lines experiment as a computer program that can be translated to graphics.

I’m not sure if Ephraim passed his intermediate computer programming course last term or not, but he can’t complain about it even if he has or hasn’t because these are skills that they are supposed to practice on, not just study and set aside.

And as an aside speaking of computer programming, what’s the use of listing down the top grades in one’s class if they’re going to be all two’s and one’s anyway, and you’re not even consistent on the number of names you put?

When the fact is that the number of names you put changes because the number of people who pass your class isn’t consistent anyway, when most of them fail.

It’s also questionable when posting pre-final standings to write something like “these people have to maintain their current standing relative to their other classmates to pass” which presupposes that a certain percentage of the class has to fail anyway.

Listing the top grades per class is already questionable in itself, especially in the light that no other teachers, either in the same field or different courses, do the same thing.

If you’re doing so because you had a positive experience looking at such when you were a student, and thus you want to pass that on, you’re alone in that attitude, which is not healthy to maintain in the non-competitive academic world.

That also makes your purpose for being in the field of education highly suspect.

It also indicates something about the teacher, not about the quality of the students, if there are consistently classes when your top grade is along the 80% mark, and no higher.

Maybe your standards are too strict, that’s why they don’t get higher grades. Maybe you don’t adjust your style so that more students learn, and you just throw everything out at them and think that the lucky ones will be able to catch it. The classroom is not a reality show where someone has to be eliminated. The fact that hardly anyone gets the highest possible grade in your classes is not something to be proud of.

Session 2149 doesn’t know whether to side with the bad student or the bad teacher. Class dismissed.