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

In my electricity and magnetism class yesterday I first told them about the expectations I had for the oral report on Wednesday.

They already realized that it took the place in the grading system of one of their written individual reports (only two required instead of the three from their mechanics lab). The reports are expected to last strictly between ten to fifteen minutes. Visual aids are expected especially for the illustrations, data tables and graphs, so if they are going to use slide presentation software, they should reserve the projector and the portable computer.

I also said that members of the same group assigned the same experiment could share visual aids on the set-up and results, but nothing else. The paraphrasing of the theory and methodology as well as the analysis and conclusions should be personal.

There were those who wanted to present only after they had seen the others go first. I told them the order is random to be drawn at the start of the session itself.

Some also protested my asking questions after their report. I said if I’m not satisfied with their presentation it was their prerogative if they wanted to boost their grade up or not by answering my questions.

And lastly, when the students asked about there being two oral reports, I told them I knew from previous experience that the first presentation of the students are hardly perfect, so they would have a chance to make up for it, and only the higher of the two reports will be recorded (not even the average). But if their first report is very good, I will exempt them from the second report.

As for the exam on Thursday, I said that I would allow them one paper of equations (not just an index card), as long as it is given to me for approval at least the day before, for possible revisions. If agreeable, then it would be photocopied for the entire class and distributed with their questionnaires and test booklets.

For the session we had graded board work, which also served as their review.

Since I used a different textbook (which only had two out of three authors in common with the book I used for the lecture) to get sample problems, I realized that I had not given them last meeting the equation for getting the total electric potential energy of a system of more than one particle. So that’s at least one thing for them to add to their equation sheet.

I had several sample problems on potential and electric fields. For one they had to find the total potential of four particles in the shape of a pyramid, as seen from one corner. In my only example for flux they had to get the area and electric field through all the faces of a tilted cube, of which only two had a non-zero cosine of the angle between the electric field and the perpendicular to the area, and they cancelled each other out, so total flux was zero.

In other news there’s already one student in my Trig class who is asking to be moved from the 1110am – 1250pm class to the 1 – 230pm class, even though it means being separated from his original group. I told him to submit a “dropping and adding” form (available at the registrars’ office) with his valid reason for wanting to change, so that it could be approved by the school directors.