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

In my electricity and magnetism lecture class last Thursday, we started on the fourth chapter, Electric Potential. We only finished up to Calculating Potential from Many Point Charges though, which will probably be the coverage of the exam on Thursday next week, which I announced. The second half of the period was devoted to examples, board work and a written exercise.

I emphasized to them that potential is a scalar, and that summation of potential from many charges is just algebraic instead of vector addition.

The exercise I gave them was to get the potential in the middle of a ring of 12 electrons. There were students who were asking if they could just compute the potential for one electron and multiply by twelve, since the radius was the same. Of course, I couldn’t tell them their deduction was correct, so I just told them to “justify their assumption on paper”, which was the start of it becoming my current favorite phrase that I used again later during the Trig exam.

After I had collected their papers, I asked the class, “Since the charges are symmetrically surrounding the point, don’t all the potentials cancel out?”

There were mutters of “I knew the answer was zero!” and “It’s another ‘Trick question!” Then I told them their answers were correct.

I admitted to them that I was waiting for people to tell me I was wrong because equal potentials on opposite sides of a point don’t cancel out since potential is not a vector.

In my other big news of the week, Miss Lissa from her observation of my Trig class last Tuesday said that she was going to recommend the splitting of the class into two new sections, not only because of the housekeeping complaining about the students moving chairs from one room to another, but also so that I could attend to needs of the small class size better.

My two Trig classes will now be one after the other in the same room, just like my mechanics lectures last term, with the same times as last term.

I finished the new section assignments and posted it outside the faculty room after their exam yesterday afternoon.

Miss Lissa told me that the displaced students could give an alternate schedule, though, as long as it does not conflict with any of their other classes.

According to the way they compute load, though, that means I’m now 2 units overload, for which I’ll receive additional compensation starting next week.

Just one gripe: Dudley was the only one who asked for and attended a tutorial from the Young Educators’ Society Thursday afternoon. He was also one of the last two to finish his exam, keeping on asking for an extension even though the teacher to the next class was already there. He even thought I would allow him to continue his exam in the faculty room. Thirty minutes later he asked if he could just get his paper back for one minute because he missed answering “twenty questions”. I declined for the same reason I declined his extensions: it would be unfair to his classmates.

Time’s out for now, I’ll continue about Dudley on Monday.