Little changes do a lot

Now I'm not sure how many people are aware of this, I know that I certainly wasn't before I began teaching; but the act of teaching a class really does seem to be similar to a theatrical performance or acting. Of course, having done nothing like acting other than distantly remembering being Joseph in some church Sunday school Christmas thing, which obviously doesn't count for much. After all, is there any more useless character in the whole nativity story? He doesn't father the child, he doesn't even succeed in finding lodging and then there are the "Wise Men" and shepherd show up and they get all the attention. Seriously, does Joseph even have any lines other than begging for a place to stay? Why didn't he just make a reservation in the first place? Clearly I've digressed... what I was trying to get to is that despite the fact that lecturing doesn't necessarily appear to be such it really is an acting job.

The reason I bring this up is that for the past year and a half I have taught all my lectures in the same classroom. This adds up to something like 150 hours of lecturing. This semester I found out, right at the last minute, that I was in a new classroom. Now this room is just across the hall from the old room, but it is also the mirror image of the old room. I was stunned how much this threw me off. I can only imagine it would be the same as performing a play for years then suddenly having the set reversed on you. Hopefully I'll get used to the classroom shortly, at least I don't have two different classrooms in the same semester, my poor little brain might not be able to handle that.

On another note I received a package of chemicals this past week. It's always fun to get things for the lab, unpacking them is like Christmas all over, just even geeky! Anyway, the three chemicals I ordered weighed a total of 10.5 grams, below are the photos of how they were shipped:






It really kind of makes me feel bad to know that a tree probably dies for every few grams of chemicals I order. I really do wish that they would use more reasonable packaging to send items.