Siliceous and Delicious

With the morning suddenly freed up after my FIB fiasco on the weekend and the ensuing cancellation of today’s booked machine time, I decided to give the EPS 8 lab for tomorrow a quick once-over, since I hadn’t so much as opened the file so far. I gave myself a strict one hour time limit to work on it, in hopes of containing the contagion and preventing the usual cancerous takeover of the whole day.

That, of course, was a foolish thing to do. One look at the lab made me realize it’s a beastly behemoth of an exercise, that’s going to require a level of effort from the students that they’ve been completely unable to muster so far, not to mention a great deal of introduction and explanation from me. That, in turn, is going to require preparation on my part so I actually understand the material I’m trying to guide them through. Fuck.

To make matters worse, there were four more labs to grade on my desk this morning, from late hander-inners. Then, we had to work on planning the field trip, talking to Andy about the date (which he finally set for Saturday, with the probable result that very few students will be able or want to attend). By the time I had finally gotten the immediate EPS 8 must-dos off my desk, it was almost noon.

After lunch, finally returned to work on my progress report presentation. Made a good bit of progress.