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

A Monday talking about a Thursday again. This will probably be the last time in a while though, because the term break will start tomorrow and instead of catching up on the past days I'll be pressured to come up with other subjects to fill the day's entry.

Today is course card distribution, by the way. Adjustment for enrollment of those who failed some subjects will be tomorrow and Wednesday.

But let me just talk about the finals in Trigonometry last Thursday for now, the last exam that I gave for this term.

The exam I gave was fifteen items: five questions on the properties of the graphs of trigonometric functions, five on the inverse trigonometric functions of angles in certain quadrants, four questions on law of sines and law of cosines, and one word problem that was the application of the same.

I made the same exam for both classes because the week before the finals, the students told Jenny the secretary that there was a conflict with one of the two consecutive trigonometry exams with their computer programming lecture class. So the secretary instead made the trigonometry exams simultaneous, with David as the proctor of the other class.

For the purpose of the students who counted their chickens before they hatched (and the maximum number of points they could get based on how many items they answered) I intentionally made it ambiguous that the first topic said "two points each", which either means two points per equation or two points per property given. It was, in fact, ten points per equation.

The same with the law of sines and cosines: it said "three points each" after the instruction "find the unknown sides and/or angles based on the given sides and/or angles". That's nine points per triangle.

Knowing the behavior of my students, I decided to proctor the first or earlier class, and left the later class to David. I didn't even arrange the chairs in the exam room of the second class (unlike what I did in the first class), but just told David that the students were supposed to sit one seat apart.

Surprisingly, the first questions from the class did not come from Deiv, but the other students. Their question, valid enough, was whether they still had to draw the graphs for the first part of the exam after (or before, depending on how good they are) computing for the minimum, maximum, amplitude, period and y-intercept.

Later, some of the students also asked about the last question, which gave the length of a taut rope to a floating hot air balloon, the angle of elevation of the balloon as seen from a point a given horizontal distance from the point where the rope is tied to the ground. They were supposed to get the angle of the rope to the ground.

That meant they could not use the "two-right triangles" approach to the problem that I introduced when we started with the topic of trigonometric functions.

What I didn't realize, having just cobbled the problem together from the description and the values of two questions in the book, was that the given two sides (one which was half of the other) and the angle (31 degrees) would not produce a triangle.

And when I did correct the given values, it was already after some students have passed their papers and left.

So in my mind I decided that the problem would just be a bonus.

More details tomorrow, and the statistics of "casualties" in my classes.