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

Back to my Trigonometric Applications class last Thursday: I guess the students were just audibly resisting the lesson, which is what started to irritate me (or continued to, from the “reprimand” during the lab the day before).

Students, particularly the girls, were saying it was difficult, and that I should allow them use of a reference sheet (just like in mechanics) during the exam. At least the boys were accepting that they’d fail when that lesson (conversion of expressions to one trigonometric function) came out in the next test.

I got to the point where I showed them the page in the book that contained all the identities we are going to take up, and with my finger and my thumb an inch and a half apart, showed them all the identities they were being asked to memorize.

And it was with this effort in mind that I started out with the derivation of the basic identities in the first place.

I also gave examples that were only the sum, product and quotient of two trigonometric functions, but there were still people saying they couldn’t get it.

I went so far as to substitute each trigonometric function with a letter variable and rewrite all the identities using those.

I was already close to the point where their defeatist attitude was tempting me to push them further instead of trying to meet them halfway.

In the end I gave them the table of trigonometric functions where they had to express each function in terms of the other five. It was the simplest expression they could convert, and they could ask me for help if they got stuck in any function.

They couldn’t finish it, of course, so I just gave it to them as an assignment.

In my mechanics class in the afternoon, I gave questions that for once were not taken from the textbook. I made some up that were easier that those.

It was like the multi-letter questions I gave to the classes two terms ago, except that now, I made sure each letter could be solved from the given values at the start, and not necessarily rely on the previous letters.

Again, it was a rush job, and even though I had the spreadsheet software in front of me for help on the number of seconds the projectile was in the air or the height it would reach given the initial vertical velocity, there was something wrong with the equation I used. In one situation, the projectile had gone below the original height before the time I stated (that’s not such a bad situation though: they could still solve for the height and the vertical velocity at that time).

It was the first of the three questions that was the worst: the projectile did not reach the height I specified. Of course, this would have been obvious if they computed for the projectile’s maximum height first, but most of them didn’t.

Besides that, this was the test where I asked them to submit a reference sheet that all students could use.

The students also agreed (after the fact) that it was good that one of the admittedly beleaguered students made the reference sheet, because they believed one of the top graders in the same position would assume too much as “stock knowledge” to be written down.

It wasn’t as good as I hoped though, because besides not reviewing because of their reliance on the reference sheet, there was still a big gap between knowing the formulas and knowing how to apply them.

Again I’ll have to cut my story short for today and save the rest for next time. Class dismissed.