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

It’s steadily getting worse, if this can be described as bad in the first place. It’s a Monday again, and I’m not talking about Friday or Thursday, but still on Wednesday. I will probably have to make some sort of adjustment so as not to be this far behind in talking about my work.

Now back to my experiences with the last experiment in the five-parts electricity and one-part magnetism lab.

Besides the wires that I described last time, we also used the DC voltage regulators instead of the dry cells mentioned in the procedure. Unfortunately, with this we had to add a resistor to the circuit because connecting the generator (even set at only 1.5 volts) on either end of the bare straight wire produced a spark (albeit a small one).

Fifty ohms, I told my cousin. A forty-seven ohm resistor was the closest he got. Unfortunately, when we tried to place the compass under and over the gray fence wire, it wouldn’t budge. Well, it did budge, but parallel to the wire, which wasn’t supposed to be the case.

We tried the bare coated wire. Same result. Ditto with the thickest but insulated wire another student brought.

I thought of decreasing the resistance, but under five minutes of operation, my cousin said the ten-ohm resistor was already hot.

There were also no results (as in change of the compass’ direction) when we used the three coils they had.

The only thing we hadn’t tried was to use batteries instead of the generator. The technician, who had brought them out earlier until I said otherwise, gave me a pair.

Finally we had a twitch, or two twitches: the compass pointed to the northwest and the northeast when placed over and under the wire connected in series to the batteries with no other resistance/load.

And inside the coil, the compass either pointed directly east or west, but on top, had to be placed at the part of the coil where the space between the wires was smaller.

Then I told them to formulate either a left-hand rule or a right hand rule to govern the relationship between the current and the magnetic field for a straight wire, and another rule for the coil that will be part of their results.

One student asked why I couldn’t just give it to them as an assignment. I said because the answer is already in the textbooks.

Sadly, none of the three groups were able to get the correct rule for both cases, which is the right hand. In either the straight wire or the coil, all the groups answered one as being the left hand rule.

And since this Wednesday is our last meeting, I told them that we will have the second oral report. Later during the lecture class I will be giving them the requirements for the second report (visual aids, strict adherence to the time limit etc).

I will also be giving them the details to the projects they asked for to boost their grades, which, besides the static jar, are proper solenoids, size D battery casings and sand like iron filings, enough for four groups, which is what I expect in the next lab class.

There are still the two exams from Thursday and Friday to discuss, electricity and magnetism lecture and trigonometry respectively, and the new brother president of system in his investiture. Those are for the next few days though. We’re done for today.