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

Some leftovers about my mechanics lab class last Wednesday: it was the first time that I finally merged the two groups from the afternoon class. These are the group with two female members (the other group has only one female member), with the group who has only one student who has always been attending.

Second, it was when I announced to them (at least those who are also my students in Trigonometric Applications) that the quiz would not push through on October 21. My common students in mechanics asked if the same were true for their quiz on the same day, but I said that that one was pushing through.

Third, apparently another thing I overlooked was giving them the standard file name for submitting the soft copy of their report.

And there was at least one student who only asked for the data sheet of his experiment on that day, for the report due on that day. I would have been suspicious if he submitted his report on that day, because I would doubt if his analysis and conclusion were from the data his group recorded or from somewhere else. But he submitted his report the next day, with the corresponding penalty for his neglect.

Lastly, it was the first time that I’ve used the new set up that my cousin and his group submitted last April, although again, David used them already last term in his mechanics lab class.

Before this though, I had to make the new exercises for Graphics Two. It has been four weeks since I made new exercises here, since the teacher handling the classes announced that the twenty I made up to the second week was supposed to last them until midterms.

I edited the last two exercises that I made for Graphics Two last school year. Four I gave last time I had to set aside because of their possibility of being exams. Not midterms though, since I’m not sure if all the students are supposed to have finished up to number 22 already by the time they have their midterms on November 3 (not October 27 because of the cancellation of afternoon classes due to the opening ceremonies of the college sports fest). But then I’ll have to ask the teacher handling the classes if he wants to give four different design problems or not.

After that I made 4 new exercises, which we did not reach last year. I even told my cousin that beyond this he couldn’t ask help from the other upperclassmen anymore.

The interesting thing about these exercises is that now different design files can be linked (such as a top view of an area with the layout of one of the buildings in the compound), and design files can also linked to real photographs. It was a chore finding out which of the several related files they had to change the name to for their exercise.

And instead of copying the files into a removable storage medium and copying them directly to the common terminal in the lab, this time I just put them in the folder of the shared documents for the faculty room, and let the technician access them from his workstation to copy to the terminal and the folder the students could get at from their own assigned computers.

In my Trig App class last Thursday, I started on the new lesson, the basic identities (reciprocal, ratio and Pythagorean) and converting expressions involving one or more functions into another that contains only one function.

Despite the fact that I showed them the derivation of the identities from equations they are already familiar with (such as the trigonometric functions in terms of x, y and r, and the Pythagorean theorem) they still complained when I said they were expected to memorize those identities.

But I’ll continue that story tomorrow. For now, class dismissed.