soapbox

Today was my first day of class for the into astronomy course that I’m doing. I have two observations.

1) 1:25 long classes are not as good as 0:50 minute classes. I’m going to have to take breaks in the middle if I want to keep people awake.

2) For the first time ever in my teaching experience, I had three students look at the syllabus and then get up and leave. I had labeled one week as covering “physics”, ie, Newton’s Laws and a little tiny bit of optics and that scared them enough that they got up and left. They might have been shopping around for classes though because three people left but there was only one person missing from my roster.