First Day

Even though I have been a teacher for almost 5 years, I had never taught a class on the very first day of a semester. I previous schedules always had classes only on Tuesdays and Thursday. You could imagine then how surprised I was at the madness of the first day on campus!

There were people every where. Starting from the parking lot, I circled four times but failed to find a parking. This had never happen to me before, partly because I was having either early morning classes starting at 8:30 am or early evening classes. In the copy center, any time you came in, there were at least 3 people ahead of you waiting in line. Just when everyone needed the copy machine the most, it worked at even slower paces. I was running between classroom and copy center and lab prep room, and I was not the only one - in fact, many people were running, our department chair was one of them. After class, students were in line asking me about the assignments, adding to the class, etc. Then I was in line asking the department chair for a bigger classroom and so on. Basically, everything I did, it took four times longer than usual to finish.

On the other hand, today, the second day of the semester, it was much orderly and less chaotic. I did not know why. Maybe after yesterday, any day becomes a better day automatically.

Knowing vs. Doing

As my last post had stated, I felt like learned a lot from Dr. Herr on website design and how to integrate internet technology and resources into classroom teaching. It was unfortunate that I did not get most of what we had been learning until very late in the semester - right around the time I created this blog which was near the end of that semester.

It took me a whole semester following that to digest what I had learned and experiment on my own a little further. In August 2009, I eventually summed up the courage to publish my webpage on a public site and started using it to communicate with my students at Oxnard College in fall 2009.

My website is still under developing, just as my students and I myself. Still, I felt good about myself, because I am not only knowing how to create a website but also doing it which is the ultimate test on what I know. As I often stress it to my students, in learning Chemistry, you can not be sure that you have understood a concept until you can apply it to solve a problem correctly. To some of my tech-savy students, you might think to publish a website is something too easy. But trust me, it is as hard to me as chemistry is to you. Since I can make progress through practice and determination in website design, you should also in learning chemistry.

Good luck in this new semester!

First Trial

I have been reading other people's blogs for a long, long time. I really would like to try in on my own now. This class that I am taking at CSUN finally got me started: it is taught by Dr. Norman Herr. I have learned so much in this class. I would recommend it to everyone who wants to catch up with the website development technologies. The professor is very knowledgable and very patient. In the end, everything starts to make sense.