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

Last Friday, while I was in my last Mathematical Methods 1 session before the finals, my co-teacher David, who is handling the other class, went into the classroom I was in and suggested that we put back word problems in the items included for the finals. I agreed, and posted it on the board immediately.

Since I let the students keep the questionnaire after the comprehensive exams, it was faster to have the recitation-slash-board-work this time because they already knew which numbers they found easy, and the others knew their standing enough that they wanted to try to answer some of the other questions that they were not quite sure about.

There were some items for which absolutely no one (at least among the three-fifths of the class that attended) volunteered to answer on the board. This included the partial fractions and getting the equation of the line based on the equation of another line perpendicular to the first one, and an included point. Just to give them a chance of answering these questions in the finals I showed the solutions on the board.

Unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to solve all the questions on the board, so I just wrote down the final answers to the last six items and left it to them to come up with that answer.

In the evening was the Trigonometric Applications third exam. Looking at our breakdown of topics and schedules for this session, it was supposed to be that three out of the four concepts about identities (half angle, double angles, and sum to product) were the only coverage of the third quiz (that never materialized) and that product to sum identities would be part of the third exam along with the properties of graphs of trigonometric functions and inverse trigonometric functions. The laws of sines and cosines is the only topic for the finals if it is not comprehensive.

In retrospect, the division of topics that we used this term was good enough. I will just have to adjust the scheduling for next term to reflect that.

During the exam itself, the students were having a difficult time from the start, where they had trouble comprehending how to get the trigonometric functions of sixty degrees from those of thirty degrees already given and using the double angle identities.

From there they had to get the functions of ninety degrees from the sum of two angles (thirty and sixty), then use those to get the functions for forty-five degrees using half angle identities.

Because of this, my co-teacher proctoring the other room (containing another section and a half) suggested that we extend the exam to 8pm instead of ending at 730pm. I agreed once more.

As usual, the students also stumbled over the verification of the identities such that for one number I had to give a hint how they were supposed to answer it, even though the hint used one of the basic Pythagorean identities.

One student from my class, who insisted on taking the exam to boost his exempted grade, regretted the decision that evening, despite having consulted all through the afternoon.

I’ll have to stop here today. I’ll continue tomorrow. Class dismissed.