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

Had my first lecture session in electricity and magnetism today.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it before, but these are the same students (all engineering, minus two who have transferred and one who has been absent since Monday) who are in the lab class.

I started out using the same method as Michael Faraday did with his experiments in electromagnetism, which did not bring in any equations whatsoever. I still would like to see his journals and see how he came to any worthwhile conclusions that any child with a magnet couldn’t discover for himself.

The first part of the period was mostly storytelling with a few essential facts snuck in, which brought me back to the days of teaching astronomy. We tackled a little bit of history, a little bit of trivia and some technical terms.

Then we brought it around to the James Clerk Maxwell style of learning, which was to put all of Faraday’s discoveries and concepts (and then some) into numeric form.

We ended up only having one new equation and one checkpoint question (from the textbook), something that I treated as a pause in the lecture. It cultivated a healthy informal discussion that also helped me to gauge their level of understanding of the concepts we tackled.

There was only one sample problem done, but from that I started to appreciate what Maila said handling these students in math. They were more participative than when they were around the other majors, including one usually silent but smart boy.

One student after the class asked me if this subject was easier than the previous one they had taken, considering this was a narrower scope than mechanics. I still said that it was relative, and dependent on the student’s comprehension.

I consider it a very relaxed class, just containing enough brevity to keep from being boring and enough knowledge not to be worthless, maybe because this is the third term that these students are in my class, and even with (or due to) my cousin being involved.

Back to the discussion on excessive absences, David suggested something that was done in the college he attended. When a student was on the verge of reaching the limit for excessive absences, he or she is sent to the guidance counselor to be appraised of the situation. When the student STILL fails to go to class after that, the teacher has to sign a form the student secures from the guidance counselor to be allowed back to class, otherwise he will already be given a failing grade. Maila liked this policy better because she said she found it more positive.

To drive the point before we voted on the issue, one faculty who had a child in college said that he would not want to send his daughter to a school where they did not care whether the student went to class or not, and could be already wasting the money they paid for tuition without knowing, until the final (failing) grades arrive.

The motion was carried 14 to 3, with only Maila, David and Sir Joel dissenting.

In the workshop we also played this game called Password, but the details about those games can wait until a slow news day.