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

On the second meeting in Advanced Mathematics for the first week of classes this third term, we had a review on matrices.

Well, THEY did. This was the peak of my sore throat that started Tuesday morning so what I did was just print out my lecture and give one page to each student in the room, and let them explain it.

Unfortunately, only six out of the eight students enrolled in the class showed up.

One left for home early. He was one of the more diligent students (copying notes all the time, and providing the reference sheets during the electricity and magnetism exams two terms ago) so I guess he had a good reason. I still need an excuse letter not to count his absence though.

The other was in a golf tournament. I received a letter about this that already passed through the dean’s office. There was a space at the bottom of the letter where I was supposed to sign having read it, but what about for my own records. So, I asked the secretary to tell the student when he returns that I should get my own copy of the letter.

Back to my first lecture though: they covered all the basics. The students were reminded of the order of matrices, which number represented the rows and which the columns, and the notation that used two subscripts.

Two of the students listed down the different types of special matrices, which covered two pages.

Someone talked about the transpose of a matrix, and another about addition of matrices.

Lastly, I had to tell them about the multiplication of matrices, which only exists if the number of columns of the first matrix equals the number of rows of the second matrix.

I gave one concrete example. It was not until the next meeting that we had sample problems to see if they understood how to multiply though, and practices on the different multiplicative properties of matrices.

In the second meeting of my Electromagnetic Theory class for the first week, we had a review on the addition of two and three-dimensional vectors.

Since I only talked about two-dimensional vectors when they were my students in mechanics, and electricity and magnetism, they freaked out when they saw the diagram for a three-dimensional vector along with the x y and z components, and the two angles (not one like in two dimensions) that help describe it. I do not believe though, that David did not discuss that with them in Advanced Mechanics One and Two in the past two terms. Either way, they will have to deal with them now.

I did jokingly threaten to force some of them to remedial sessions in my mechanics classes when they still stumbled on how to solve some of the easy problems.

I will continue discussing this next time. That is all for this week. Class dismissed.