First day of class

I survived the first day - fairly smoothly! We're in a pretty small and poorly-laid-out room for the 45 students I have. There's one small white board and a big load-bearing post in the middle of the room that obstructs a lot of the view. This is in the "old" building--the labs and my new office are in the "new" building which is supposed to be done tomorrow. We're supposed to have all our lectures in the old building, though and it will pose some challenges--if I could get a moveable white board in there, it would solve a lot of them..... I'm excited to see the new spaces--we're supposed to meet our lab sections there starting Tuesday--Inshallah! Ed. note: the term "inshalla" means "god willing" and you say it when you have no idea when something will happen, or if something is never going to happen, or if you hope it does it happen.

My students have pretty much all had some high school chemistry, so I'm putting together a quiz for them to gauge their knowledge and skill level.
They also have some pretty awesome names. Here's a sampling and I'll let you guess which is are first names and which are last. To protect the innocent, only half of anyone's name is here :-)
Sivapragasam, Pannidipperuma, Vijayan, Pathmakumary, Kalaiyarasi, Kelzang and Chogyol, to name but a few....should be fun to learn them all!
They've been in the same class for two whole years now, so they already know each other well.
I'm looking forward to a good semester!