The snow cancellations of the past two weeks have been weighing very heavily on my mind these recent days.

While no one is to blame for this difficulty, as your instructor, it is my responsibility to get all of you brought up to date as quickly as possible yet, with some sense of organization, and this I intend to do.

I have come up with a plan for the next two weeks of lectures that, if all goes as I hope it will, our goal will be reached. The method I will use will be used in subsequent lectures as well, depending on how effective this method is in the next two lectures.

In the next two lectures, I will be presenting you with a programming problem, one each week. The first problem will be similar for the most part to the assignment 3 I have assigned to you.

This coming week, I will first explain about the If statements, as I have been wanting to do these past two weeks, and then we will look at the program I am writing for you. It is my intention to explain the program in detail step by step, as I have written it, beginning with logically going through the requirements. So, we will first determine what our end result will be then, what we will need, followed by putting the program together. I will give each of you any hard copies of what I have developed at Monday nights lecture, not the program itself, as that will have to be uploaded to you.

For this to work, I will have to insist that we stick only to the program. I will, of course, entertain ONLY questions that pertain to what were doing. No advanced ideas or scenarios and no tangents. I believe this can be accomplished in our allotted time each week, but your cooperation will be needed, by sticking strictly to matters at hand. Any questions outside the subject(s) covered will be accepted after class but not during.

After the lecture on each of the Mondays, I will upload a copy of the example to any student who e-mails me for it. Copies of the flowcharts and IF statements examples I use before looking at the program, will also be sent upon the asking.

Therefore, your assignment, at this time, is still assignment 3, which after Monday should be clearer and none of you should have difficulty with it.

Also, as for the Quiz, the due date has been extended to 10:00 P.M. Monday, March 3^rd. By this time, you should have had no trouble completing the section on IF statements.

Part 2 of our catching up will be on Monday March 3^rd, where I will present another program, which will include For Next loops, sub Procedures and sub Functions and the Input Box.

In both weeks, it is possible that I will include a couple of added features/tools and/or suggestions, which will be of help to you in your assignment developments.

Notice also, that I have postponed any grading of the quiz and assignment 3 until after our next lecture. I am doing this to allow anyone who wishes to make changes for a re-submission of their assignment 3 and/or quiz may do so with no penalty. Keep in mind, however that the rule of accepting the quiz later than the time given above will stand. Once the time has past, it has past!

Assignments passed in later, are accepted, however.

On the weekend of March1st, 2^nd, I will assign assignment 4.

Be sure to have done all the reading that has been assigned thus far.

For those of you who want to get additional reading done, you could read chapter 8 on arrays. We should get to arrays somewhere around March 11^th.

Any questions you may currently have, I will respond to as best as I can. It is sometimes difficult to explain things in e-mails but I will do my best. It has taken me longer to get to questions than it normally would because I have had many more than I would have had, if we would not have been faced with the cancellation problem.

Thank you all for your understanding and cooperation and I will look forward to seeing you Monday evening.