attempting to move the jquery code from html into the angular file. Evidently it's bad form to stick lots of jquery inside of angular...as made evident by the student UI breaking. Gotta translate this right.
still no luck. researching similar questions on the googles.
breakthrough! tinkering with ng-disable = isDisabled, and  is getting some results on jsfiddle experiments...working on the app now
YUS. Disable functionality is working, with timeout