With the end of winter imminent and the (astronomical) start of spring soon, thoughts of renewal, of growth begin to emerge. Also, (harsh) reality has regrettably crystallised. The extant year is done; it's too late to recover from earlier naivity and/or laziness about necessary attributes for success at gce a chemistry. Although not as popular as before the amgaf-analogous social media oligopolists, teachers' blogs remain an enjoyable medium to read. Except, there appears to be an absence of commentary about the weak student. All the best teachers out there promote how good they are to get those aspirational (and those with cash) students into the elite courses, institutions, but what about those at the other end of the spectrum? Those where grade 'C' is considered "amazing"?
How long should modern computer hardware be operable? A reasonably reliable chromebook, now suffers from a failed usb port after ten years of faithful service (by definition, without incident). A web search indicated all sorts of esoteric nerd references to uefi, bios, blah, blah blah. No thanks. Time to start saves of content, software, software configuration, etc. to external storage, before failure occurs to the second (final) usb port.
