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

On the current state of my schedule, the Advanced Mathematics class has indeed been moved to Monday and Thursday at 1 to 230 pm. Although I did meet them in the Tuesday/Friday schedule last Tuesday, I met them on the new time today.

But let me return first to the first week, first meetings of my mechanics classes.

I told them about the Interactive Science contest, which is still ongoing until the first week of February. At least I already set a ceiling, that they could get a maximum of twenty percent depending on how good their submission is, and that it is not fixed (mediocre projects may get less).

After a meeting with the Dean last Monday afternoon though, there is a move to assign set-ups to the students for February. These are the easier ones we can think of from the list of fifty plus possible exhibits that we know the students will be able to make and submit in at most a week’s time.

Since we are talking about a maximum of sixteen groups total in their four mechanics lab classes (with a division of four groups each), I may have to add some simple displays into the mix that I had originally eliminated because of how simple they were.

There is also a suggestion to make another pair of the big ear dishes, deeper ones this time, to get sounds from a more concentrated direction instead of picking up signals from the whole quadrangle area, as the Dean realized one Saturday.

Ways of improving the Galton board (the second Pachinko ramp we have, triangular in shape this time, with more compartments in the bottom and using larger balls than the ones for table tennis – something Sir Joel got as a submission from his engineering students in statistics class) were also forwarded, including a funnel for making it easier to drop the balls from the top, getting more balls, and making the compartments at the bottom deeper.

The following new exhibits were also mentioned: a basketball hoop connected to a sensor and a digital counter like they have in the video game arcades and the 3D stereogram puzzles that used to be very popular back in the nineties.

But I digress. I also reminded my mechanics classes during the first meeting of the term about that the policy about excessive absences will be strictly enforced, and that they will have one compulsory meeting with the guidance counselor (before they can be admitted back to class – sounds self-defeating).

Now on the second meeting for the first week, we took up the entire Chapter 1 of the textbook (still not required, but just as helpful in passing the subject). I asked them to enumerate the three basic quantities we were to measure and compute, placing the wrong answers in a second column.

This was after I had already given the limit of our discussion, which excluded electricity, magnetism, thermodynamics, optics and astronomy. Thus we would not be talking about such quantities as voltage, heat and light intensity.

Finally they determined that I was talking about length, mass and time.

But I’ll have to continue this discussion next time. Class dismissed for now.