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.

Full of news about a certain student today, both academically related and not. There’s a point when I think I’m tired of writing about him, but there’s another part of me that believes we’re reaching a crux point soon when things will either come to a boil or a simmer.

First, in class, I would have felt guilty about not telling him directly that there would be an exam yesterday.

I tried to rationalize it that part of classroom demeanor is maintaining a good relationship with your classmates so that they would voluntarily inform you of things you needed to know for class.

But for once he wasn’t late, and in fact was reading his notebook when I arrived in the classroom on the dot.

I told them to put all of their things in front, and because I didn’t make a seating arrangement, he got to sit on the first row. But I did catch him with his notebook on the seat.

Now I’m wondering if I should have waited until he tried to use it and give him an automatic zero in that test.

First question off the bat was about one of the reserved words we used for declaring variables.

I realized if he didn’t know something that simple, there really wasn’t much he could answer in the exam.

Next question was about the execution table to be filled out, which I slammed by telling the class in general to read the instructions.

Eventually, halfway to the end, he gave up and passed his test paper. Then he tried to compensate by saying he had a question about science, which I had to shut down again since I said I had to proctor the exam, and had to detail to him guarding against some people cheating.

Somehow I believe that’s his unique way of trying to get back in my good graces, talking about something theoretical. Does he really not see that it’s all these little quirks in his behavior that add up to something irredeemable, and that he’s still really just barely tolerated?

Before he left though, he had a complaint (his first one because before he just asked about if the exam would have been easier as closed notes, not whining actually) about having different expectations about the exam since it was closed notes. I said having the exam closed notes doesn’t mean it is all memorization; they still have to be able to be familiar with the commands and know how to analyze.

Besides, we’re already dealing with relatively advanced topics. This means that as a teacher it is more difficult to have code questions that are only ten lines long, when dealing with two-dimensional arrays and such.

Session 2463 believes there is enough compelling evidence to fail this student in this subject this term. Class dismissed.