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

One major point I'd like to add about my lecture class in electricity and magnetism last Monday is that I taught them the right hand rule of getting the cross product of two vectors, besides the right hand rule determining direction of current and magnetic fields. This is despite avoiding talking about the dot product during the early topics in our lecture.

I immediately had some checkpoint questions for the magnetic force as the cross product of the particle's velocity and magnetic field, using the x, y and z axes, just to see if they understood the concept. I next expanded this to the effect of a magnetic field on a current carrying wire, with another cross product equation. There was also the torque of a free spinning rectangular loop of wire in a magnet.

In the last chapter we discussed magnetic field due to a straight wire, a wire arc, and a wire coil. Lastly we had another checkpoint for rating three arcs with different radii according to increasing magnetic field.

Some students decided to just give random numbers without computing (seeing as there are a limited number of combinations), and I gave them the correct way to solve for the magnetic fields before we dismissed. I had to show them that even for an incomplete loop of wire, the right hand rule for the direction of the magnetic field still applied.

Besides that, I also gave pointers for the oral reporters in the lab class Wednesday, including holding and reading from only index cards and just putting the important keywords in the visual aids (as well as the illustrations, tables and graphs).

On Tuesday I had my second to the last lecture in trigonometry. First I discussed the properties of the graphs of trigonometric functions. I had to use an overhead projector for this since the laptop and large LCD screen were already reserved by another class.

So instead of making the graphs from a spreadsheet right then and there in the classroom, I had to print all eighteen graphs beforehand on transparencies. I also had to print them on paper for the students to be able to photocopy, which turned out to be a good thing because Deiv sat right behind the projector, and as soon as I was finished with one acetate he immediately asked to borrow it. I referred him to the printout to photocopy, which I gave to one of their classmates to take care of.

After giving some examples on how to compute for the minimum, maximum, aplitude, period and y-intercept of different types of sine and cosine equations, he started on the second to the last topic of the term, inverse trigonometric functions.

I showed them the limitations of getting these inverse functions on their calculators, which was basically that the values given on their calculators only covered two of the four quadrants. So if they knew from the values of x and y (a combination of negative and positive values) that the angle is not from the two quadrants represented, then they have to be able to get the equivalent angle.

Opinion showed that they found these topics easier than the identities. And they found the first topic easier than the second. I told them that we would discuss the last topic (law of sines and law of cosines) on Friday, our very last meeting.

I'll continue on this again tomorrow. That's all we have time for today.