Last Saturday, I went two-for-three. No, I’m not talking about my performance on the softball field, but rather what happened at the last one-day Tech class I taught.
This was a very strange class. First of all, I only managed to get five people to register for this class. That’s odd because in nearly all of them to date, between ten and twenty signed up for the class.
Someone suggested that the low turnout was due to the fact that I’d already taught everyone within driving distance that was interested. I don’t think that’s the case, since I still have nearly 60 names on my mailing list.
Another possibility is that it was a football Saturday. Ann Arbor is home to the University of Michigan, which has the largest American football stadium in the world. The “Big House,” as they call it, accommodates nearly 110, 000 fans, and the traffic gets really bad. There’s some merit to this argument, but while we didn’t have a class in September last year, the one that we ran in September 2008 had 13 students (12 passed).
Whatever the reason, only five people pre-registered. One pulled out a few days before the class, and one didn’t show up , so there were only three in the class.
None of them, as it turns out, did any pre-study. That wasn’t a problem for one of the students, who works as an electronics technician. He only missed two questions on the test.
It was more problematic for the other two, but one of them still managed to pass the test. She scored 29/35. The third student missed by three questions, scoring only 23/35.
This class was also notable in that it was the first time that I got to be a Volunteer Examiner. The three of us administering the test were Mark, W8FSA; Jim, K8ELR; and yours truly. That was an interesting experience, but it’s too bad that we had to tell our third examinee that he failed the test.
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