37 new Techs ticketed Saturday

Although I had a record 55 students sign up for my class yesterday, only 37 ended up getting their licenses. Here’s how it broke down:

• 55 signed up for the class
• 10 people didn’t show up for one reason or another
• 2 people decided not to take the test. Both said that they didn’t have time to do so, even though I clearly stated what the schedule would be.
• Of the 43 who took the test, 37 passed, 6 failed.

Class Notes

• The class was held on the University of Michigan campus in Room 1500 of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) Buidling. Without a doubt, this was the nicest class room I’ve ever taught in. It was carpeted, which was a lot easier on my knees. I could have stood for the entire time, if I’d had to.
• A lot of the no-shows were U-M students, for whom I waived the $10 class fee. Even so, 40% of the students in this class were U-M students.
• One of the students was a recently-retired electrical engineering professor. Now, I can brag that I’ve even taught PhD EEs!
• As usual, the main reason that people did not pass the test was failure to study the material before coming to the class. One guy said to me just before he left, “I probably should have started reading the study guide before 11:30 last night.” When I hear stuff like that, I just want to scream.
• My local VE team came up big, really big. They knew that we were going to have lots of students, and they showed up in force. There were two teams of three checkers and three proctors, who helped process the paperwork. Even so, it took nearly three hours for them to administer the tests and get all the paperwork in order. THANKS, GUYS!
• When I was preparing the room, I noticed a sign on the wall that said that recording equipment was available. I didn’t think that it would be available on such short notice, but I asked one of the U-M club guys who was there about possibly recording the class. He said, “Yeah. We could do that if you’d like,” and then disappeared. About ten minutes later, he returned with a camera and remote mike and set it all up. So now, we have this entire class on disk.
• The question, now, is what to do with it.  It’s apparently close to 200 Gbytes of data. I’m thinking that somehow I’ll slice and dice it into smaller chunks to put on YouTube. That’s going to take a lot of editing, though.