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

Very laid back lecture in electricity and magnetism today. I gave some more examples on two-dimensional summation of electrostatic forces due to more than one charged particle. I also introduced the concept of the uniformly charged hollow sphere.

The exercise I gave them though, which was simply a checkpoint in the textbook (that could be solved without equations) took them more than the remaining twenty minutes of class time to finish, so it became an assignment.

I guess the two-fold nature of the question threw them off, because besides solving for the electrostatic forces of three different configurations of three particles, they also had to arrange them in order of largest to smallest magnitude.

I’m sure they’ll realize how easy the problem really is once they put their minds to it.

I also had to remind them about the method we used last term of breaking down a two-dimensional vector in its x and y (horizontal and vertical) components, which they will be using extensively again.

Student Affairs Director Ronnie also asked me for two “challenges” like the ones that Maila has been giving out to her Math 1 students. These inventive problems are posted in the hallway and the first few people who pass the correct answers get incentives, usually bonus points in the next major exam.

Ronnie just organized it so that several subjects will have the same additional exercises for the students, with the added prize of a free lunch from the cafeteria (charged to his Freshmen Orientation budget). He asked me for one teaser for Trigonometry and in Mechanics.

I would have made one for Electricity and Magnetism, but that would have been too esoteric. At least with the first two I know even those who are not taking the subject have a passing knowledge of the topics from their high school.

On another topic, it’s the second week of classes and there are still students who are asking to take the diagnostic tests in Math 1 and English because they weren’t here (either due to absence or not having been enrolled yet) during the first day of classes.

If I were still teaching Math 1 this term, I would have insisted that no diagnostic tests be given already. After all, we had already a devil of a time switching the students’ schedules around just because we had to assure that students were in the “advanced” sections of both. This we accomplished by letting the English teachers take the 8-930am slot for their top class, and we took the 940-1110am time for our highest scorers, of which, of course, there were some overlaps.

After that first allotment, they now can just put the late students in some of the middle sections, just making sure that their English and Math 1 classes (all set for 8 to 1110am) do not conflict.

Other than that, Maila is already appreciating the split, because not only are the scores (for the duplicated first quiz) of the extreme classes in two separate ranges, but she can now explore more complicated topics than she had done before, and not at some slower students’ suffering.