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!