School Daze....

Today was the first day of school here at Tiny U.    We've recently developed a new program that funnels most of its students into my class, so the class was double the size this year.

That's 12 instead of 6.

It's an interesting mix.  I have everything from 17 and 18 year old traditional freshmen to students who are my age and returning to finish up the prerequisite classes for medical school.  Most of them are very bright, and you can bet I'm going to be riding the asses of the low ones to keep up, because they all have serious potential to do well.

As usual, the first class was pretty short.  I had a 15 slide power point which was both introductory material (biological chemistry stuff) and points about the syllabus (show up, don't cheat, do your work, come to office hours).  Then we talked briefly about lab safety and all the dos and don'ts of the lab.  Most of which are common sense.  Like don't touch a hot plate, you can't tell if it's too hot or not.  Or never pipet by mouth.  Umm.  EWWWWW.  And yet, there are idiots in this world who do.  I swear.

We were done by the time I should have been done lecturing.  Yay me.  So I spent the next hour wrestling a copier and copying the first two chapters for students whose books still haven't arrived.  See, one of the drawbacks of being Tiny U. is that we don't have a bookstore.  So students have to order their books online or look for them at USC, UCLA, or some other large bookstore.  And that can take time.  In a class I taught 2 years ago, the books were backordered from the publisher and we couldn't do anything about it for 3 weeks.  Ugh.  What a mess.

The other thing about this class is that it starts at 8am.  Which means that to get here on time I need to leave my house before 7am.  6:30 if I need to make a stop at the gas station or Whorebucks. (or Coffee Bean.... or Peet's).  And then when I get here, it's a toss up as to whether I'll be able to get set up as I need security to let me in to the classroom and to open up the computer podium for me.  Urg.  Try finding a security guard when you need one.  In the hood.....

Anyway, if you need me 8-12 Tuesday and Thursday or 9-10 Friday, Pacific Time, AM, you know where I'll be.  Broadening young minds.  Heh.  Yeah, that's it.