Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Thursday I had my second to the last lecture session in Trig, where I gave the application problems for the Laws of Sines and Cosines. This included almost the same types of situations we had when I made them calculate for the height of the building and the depth of the ground floor from the second story hallway.

Their finals will include just these, the properties of the graph (amplitude, period etc.) and the sum-to-product and product-to-sum identities. It’s actually a very small list of topics, and in our reviews I’ve already exhausted all the types of problems that could come out in the exam. I really don’t think they will have a difficult time with this exam unless they don’t exert any amount of effort understanding the concepts and applications.

I switched my classes in mechanics yesterday because more than half of my students said that they preferred to attend the picnic for their P.E. classes at noon, as well as the badminton tournament open that would follow, the culmination of the event started during the week of Valentines.

In fact some of my students in Trig already did not attend because they said they were in charge of the food for the lunch.

Luckily the faculty attendance checker accepted my change of schedule form (just a change of venue really), and I got to help in the preparations and supervising at the venue itself, even though the food did not arrive by 1pm, and were brought to the badminton courts instead. By 1pm the P.E. teachers also decided to stop waiting for the food at the original venue, and proceeded to the courts. I was told the barbeque and grilled hotdogs were only half-cooked by 2pm, at that. I didn’t keep abreast with the status of the all-meat menu.

This means that my class in mechanics on Monday will be the last session. I’m still thinking if the last topic, torque and rotation, will be included in the coverage of the finals.

After all, even though we did not discuss it in class (and won’t – at least not in detail - if Monday’s session is a review of the topics for the finals), it was the subject of their last experiment, and that means they should be familiar with the equations.

On the other hand, that also means that it will be in the coverage of the finals for the lab. So they will be studying the topic anyway.

That’s actually an argument that makes it both for and against being included in my lecture exam. I will most likely decide by Monday, when I will announce to the class the real coverage of the exam depending on the topics I will include in our review.

The schedule for finals starting April 12 is already out. My Trig class will have their exam on Tuesday morning. Mechanics will have their exam on Monday morning, with Maila proctoring the second exam. The lab classes will have their exam on Wednesday morning, and I will be proctoring one of the three classes already.

In fact, we can probably dispense with the third proctor altogether since the fifty plus students can fit into two classrooms with me and David supervising.

This schedule means that I should have finished and reproduced at least the Monday morning exam by Tuesday, April 6, next week, if not all of them.