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

Yesterday I announced the first quizzes in Trigonometry and Electricity, which will be on Friday and Thursday next week respectively. I hope I can keep up with the schedule to have fifty-point quizzes and hundred-point exams in both subjects alternating every two weeks until the week before finals.

For the Trigonometry class I also told them that they should submit a test booklet for the exam on our next meeting, which is Tuesday. I emphasized that they should not write their name on the front of the test booklet, but at the back.

The point of this is to prevent the temptation of some people to put the formulas and equations they need in the test booklet if I told them to just bring it on the exam day itself. If questioned afterwards, it is difficult to disprove that they did not just write the formulas there after the exam started.

Now with the exam booklets collected the meeting before and redistributed during the exam itself, I can be assured that all the exam booklets are clean when I give it to them. After all, the only rule I have is that they cannot use the test booklet that they submitted.

Okay, one of two rules. The other one is that those who did not submit a test booklet could not take the exam - consequences of their actions and all that.

Today I also heard one of the students (probably the same one that Maila complained about in her Math 1 class who behaved uncharacteristically unlike a student who was prepared for all the rigors of studying Engineering) said that I was going a little too fast in my lecture.

This was after I asked my cousin to ask our neighbor (who is also my student) if the lecture was paced a little on the upbeat side.

The problem was that I was just introducing (or reintroducing, in the case of some of them) the trigonometric functions. I had to list them down first before I could make proper examples based on the concepts and equations given. I couldn’t very well define the sine function first, give some applications THEN proceed to the cosine function, although a non-conventional teacher could probably pull that off. So that was one instance where I couldn’t abide to his request and slow down.

Later that same student asked what was the practical application of the functions. I have now made him and his classmates look forward to measuring the height of the building without hanging a long piece of rope down from the roof.

As for my electricity class last Thursday, I finished the first chapter of the coverage: electric charge, and told them that I will be giving them their first problem set soon. We also started on the next chapter, which is about electric fields.

My problem right now is that some of the students have not yet taken up integral calculus (such as my cousin). So I cannot go in depth into applications of electric fields on continuous lines of charge and the Gauss law. Besides, David discouraged me from discussing those, although that could be just a personal aversion he had from college. I’ll cross that bridge and all that.

What was curious was that during our class, there was a lightning display visible in the distance outside the window distracting the students. I could have stopped the whole discussion and just joined them in staring at the storm for the next hour and a half. It was very tempting.