And so the year begins

Ah the joys of the start of a new semester.

Actually, I can't complain all that much. I had 100% attendance in my Physics 2 class. Seriously. Perfect attendance. Now I have to figure out how to integrate the new kids into the cult that is our learning community. Better yet, our folks in charge of the Physical Plant did not do anything odd to save money and I had nice warm dry air in the classroom when doing electrostatics demos. They worked perfectly. I mean perfectly. I was able to clearly demonstrate that there are two different kinds of charge and that like charges attract and unlike charges repel.

Elsewhere ...

Some rocket scientist used a dry erase marker to write on the Smartboard in one of my classrooms. Hint: those things do not erase when used on a Smartboard instead of a whiteboard. (I should probably try to read what is there to figure out who the guilty party might be.)

And I had a kid enrolled in my Physics 1 class (which requires calculus) whose information sheet said he was taking trig. Yep, right out of Becky Hirta's playbook when teaching the Calculus Circus at a school without any computer pre-req checks. I looked at his transcript and he was taking trig. Turns out that some other rocket scientist, a newly hired "student centered" counselor, pushed past the computer protections and put him in my class because it is required for his major. Close, but no cigar. His major requires PASSING my class, not simply taking it, and you aren't going to pass my class if you haven't already passed trig. In fact, they often don't pass my class if all they managed to do was scrape by with a C in trig.

But I also have students who started on their computer-based homework even before the first class met. I am not worthy, but I try.