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

Mechanics lecture classes, first and second meetings, fourth week of classes, third trimester: I didn’t get to attend these sessions because it was at the same time as the contest we were on, so I asked my co-teacher to substitute.

Well, proctor, technically, because it was coincidentally and providentially it was the same day as the quiz that I scheduled and announced the week before.

So all I had to do was print up and reproduce the two questionnaires the day before the quiz.

I didn’t have enough time though, for some reason. So I just dredged up the two quizzes I used around this same time last year, when I also had two consecutive mechanics lecture classes, with the first quiz being relatively easier than the second because the students there had no idea what to expect and they could be asked by their friends from the later class in the ten minutes between periods.

What I didn’t realize until I got home the night before the contest was that both papers, that contained six items each, might have covered more than the topics that I said was included in the quiz.

And I was right about making that oversight when I checked the documents again early the next morning. The last question in both quizzes was about freely falling bodies, which we have not covered in class yet. I had told the students to study only up to constant acceleration in one dimension – horizontal.

In retrospect I can’t believe I would have four topics and make two problems on the first two and one each on the last two.

So I had rush off another note to my co-teacher who was going to substitute for me, giving the students the value of acceleration due to gravity.

To ward off potential complaints from them about unfair practices, I also adjusted the point system so that it was still possible for them to get fifty points even without answering the last problem.

Then when I introduced freely falling bodies in the next meeting, I told them that the action was an intentional experiment I was conducting with a school director known for his slightly unconventional teaching ideas.

This time I listed down all the things I expected them to know, such as the fact that an object in vertical upward motion passing the same point twice has the same velocity at those loci, but opposite in direction.

Another is that when the velocity is zero, the object is at maximum height.

There is also the fact that if the object’s “flight” starts and ends at the same spot, the time elapsed going up is the time elapsed going down, or that the object is halfway through its airborne travel when it is at the peak of the rise.

I am planning to give them more complicated examples next meeting, on the same topic.

That’s it for today. I’ll continue with my other lectures next time. Class dismissed.