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

Hoping to finish with the electricity and magnetism lab oral reports last Wednesday: there were two students who did not review on the material, hoping that their slide presentation would carry them. Unfortunately, that was not the case. One of them was the third to report on the galvanometers, and he paused several times in the theory section, even though the equations were already on the slide in front of us for him to just expound on.

The second was the girl who did not give a first report. In this report, she would stop in the middle of sentences and start on a new slide, several times. She also kept muttering loudly “what was that?”, “oh my” and “darn”. If that was supposed to garner me sympathy for her situation, it didn’t, because she did promise me she would make up for passing up on the first report here. This was definitely far from her best effort. So much for emphasizing a preview of their thesis defense then, when, if luck was against them, their panelists would try to confuse and intimidate them by turning the concepts around, just to see how well they know the material.

There were also two students who were not present to give a report, both of them giving otherwise consistently good performance in the other requirements. They still have to go through the procedure of having their excuse letter noted by the dean’s office though.

And overall that’ s a big disappointment for me this term, especially since some of them made a big deal about going home early the day before to work on their report and, as I said earlier, during my Graphics One class. As if relative last minute preparations would impress me.

In the last electricity and magnetism lecture meeting for the term, there were only two of my students in the room when I got there. There were others, but they were from another class.

In fact, I thought I would be late having gone off campus to have lunch with my co-teachers, so before we left I had given the textbook to one of them for review. When we were already on our way back after the meal, I texted my cousin the activity for the day. It was for each student to pick one problem from the book and solve it on the board.

So I had to go back to the faculty room, get my other textbook and some chalk, and just write out several practice problems on the board. It was while I was writing these (nine of them) that my cousin and the rest of the students showed up.

Of course I knew why they were late. It was to complete the problem set I gave them last week. Now, because of the time wasted waiting for them, instead of solving the problems myself, I told them that it was a combination board work and seatwork.

Students would volunteer to answer any item, and whatever was not solved correctly would be part of their seatwork. Eventually all the problems were answered though. I guess the discussion was still fresh from their memory from last meeting. Besides that, they already had an idea about the types of questions I chose from book to give them. Lastly, since this is for the finals, which represents 40% of their grade, they wanted to be able to verify in front of the teacher if they knew how to apply the concepts correctly.

Except for some repeated errors of not changing centimeters into meters, they were able to answer them all. In fact, recently slacking student Roland showed off his prowess solving for the magnetic field for two problems, a combination of several straight wires and some arcs.

There was also one sample of the cross product right hand rule that became another lesson on the convention of the positive x, y and z axes (thumb, forefinger and middle finger) on the same right hand.

There were no questions from the students just copying their classmates’ solutions. And I was heartened to see a consistent underachiever Conrad writing down the answers diligently (for study later, I hope).

Theres’ the bell. I’ll finish with Thursday and start with Friday tomorrow. Dismissed.