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

Returning to my discussion of the second meeting of the mechanics classes for the first week of classes, after listing down the three basic quantities we were to concentrate on, I asked them for some sample units of the length, mass and time.

In fact in the first of the two classes I had to explicitly give the definitions and difference between quantities and units because, when I asked for the quantities, one of them answered “meters”.

After that, I then distinguished the two grouped systems of measurements, Metric and English, and then asked them for the conversions between the two systems that they are familiar with.

I provided the ones they were not familiar with, such as how many feet in one mile and how many liters in one gallon. After the list of relative values was complete we had some sample problems on conversions.

In keeping with the times I used an example of one of the students having a chat mate from a European country who gave his or her height and weight in units they are not accustomed to.

Converting one basic unit to another was easy, then we went to secondary quantities, where there were more than one quantity and unit. Then they would have to be aware of what unit is in the numerator and which is in the denominator so that canceling one unit after multiplying with the equivalent fractions would get them the proper result.

I also had to give special emphasis to the units with exponents like area (length squared) and volume (length cubed) where the converting values had to be raised to two or three as well.

I used the unit light year (emphasized as being a measure of length and not time) to segue into the next topic, which was expressing very large or very small numbers in scientific notation. For most (if not all) of them it was a review anyway.

Then from there I talked about the prefixes used in the metric system, which have their equivalent exponents of ten in scientific notation.

Since I forgot to tell them to bring scientific calculators for their computations, some of them used their cellular phones for computing the sample problems in our lesson, and when we got to the scientific notation, they got an errors that the numbers were too large to display.

It would have been the perfect opportunity to talk about shortcuts in solving operations with scientific notation, but it would have been useless to those who used scientific calculators, and eventually, all of them would when we get to the first anyway.

So I didn’t grasp that brass ring, and scientific calculators were shared all around, which I just emphasized would not be allowed during the quiz. So on the meeting after that, there were more scientific calculators brought out.

And that’s my first lecture meetings in mechanics for the first week of classes. I’ll talk about my first lecture session of the term in Advanced Math and Electromagnetic Theory next time. For now, class dismissed.