first day discoveries

I am reminded that the routines of preparing for a first day of a new semester should not be completely crowded out by preparations for something more exciting.

1. Copying a syllabus a week in advance, putting it on color paper, and stapling the two pages together is all wasted effort if you fail to move it from your home-office floor into your book bag for the first day of class.
2. Emailing your syllabi to your department's administrative assistant, even before it is requested, means you have copies in your email outbox -- even if you wrote the syllabi on a different computer.
3. Baking soda dissolves and mixes with water much more readily that does corn starch. While green and semi-solid, unless oobleck is made from a box that say CORN STARCH instead of BAKING SODA (even though they look like the same box) then it's just as well to dump the slurry down the drain.
4. Recycling an old powerpoint slide show can, with just a little bit of Q&A, fill the time during which students would have been investigating oobleck.
5. Except for the corn starch, I have all the equipment needed to make oobleck for the next time class meets. Since Labor Day is next Monday, that means there are two weeks to remember to buy the right box.