danaleeling

Laboratory six on heat was replaced by an exercise that had previously been done on Fridays as a midterm assessment.  I generated data and the students had until 5:00 PM to generate a laboratory report on that data. I let them tell me what to do. Because we had three hours I reduced the structure and framing from the Friday sessions. I told them only that I thought there was a relationship between swizzles and velocity, but I did not tell them how to set up the data gathering. I simply said I would do what I was told. Marlin and his partner Hart made a request that I swizzle at specific rates as low as one third of a Hertz. One third, one half, one, two, and three Hertz exactly. I found I could not keep time, so I downloaded the Soundbrenner metronome app and used that to time my swizzles. This forced a new way to swizzle where I would pulse and rest. That was something I had not considered doing before. I ran the runs uphill to avoid the slight slope that might confound the data....

At term start my target was to have 80% of my materials - assignments, quizzes, tests, presentations - in place for all four of my courses. I was keenly aware from the summer that once the term began the bulk of my time would be spent providing student support and that I would no longer have significant amounts of time to prepare and deploy material for my courses. My goal was to have enough of a head start that the students would not catch up to my preparations prior to the end of the term. Thus far I have succeeded, but my pace of preparation has been slower than even I anticipated. I had expected to wrap up course development by midterm, but in one course I am still developing materials for deployment in November. That said, with three courses complete, I am now confident that materials will be in place for students ahead of their arrival at that point in the curriculum. The need to be 80% ready on day one certainly seems supported in my mind by my own experience. I am also too keen...