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

Finished the chapter (second in the course outline) on Electric Fields today in my electricity and magnetism class. As I said before, what made it easier was that I just skimmed over the parts with the differentiation and the intergration. After all, my cousin and three of his batchmates in engineering are only now finalizing their section in integral calculus for this term. Otherwise they would be one term behind in their math classes from the regular students.

Maila is their teacher, and she is already telling them that they will have to make up for the the six hours missed during the first two weeks of classes when the schedule was still nebulous and was in danger of being dissolved and refunded.

In the second half of the class we had the practice boardwork for their quiz on Thursday, giving the different kinds of ways that the minimal equations given may be used. This includes looking for the distance between two charges given the electric charge and the electrostatic force and solving for the electric charge given the distance from the point charge and the magnitude of the electric field. It is still more than fifty percent review of the vector addition (mostly by component method) that we had during the pervious term.

It also seems that in their BioChem subject, they also had the review on significant figures, conversion of units, scientific notation and the metric system prefixes that we had during the course on mechanics in the third term last schoolyear.

Looking at them group-answering an assignment they had in that subject, I had to remind them that when it came to exact conversions, such as meters to centimeters, the numeric values had an infinite number of significant figures and therefore did not complicate the rounding off of the results. Of course, from English to metric and vice versa the number of significant figures mattered.

In other news, it is the third week of classes, and we (both the students and the teachers) have noticed that my co-teacher David is still having lunch with his brother who is a freshman majoring in Computer Science. We are starting to become concerned that even though the brother did not take the course that will have his older sibling as a teacher (engineering), outside of the classrooms, the student is only having minimal interactions with his classmates.

We have no idea how to broach the subject to David tactfully though.

Today also marked when all of the lecture rooms were moved up one floor to accomodate the incoming students. For everyone that just means one more flight of stairs to climb going up to their classes. This was done a week before the old rooms would be used by the new occupants, so there is one week when the old rooms will be empty, and by the time they show up, there should be no more confusion with students showing up in classes meant for others.