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

Last time I had begun to talk about the lecture I gave in the first session of my mechanics lecture periods for the eighth week of classes in the third trimester, and we were discussing Projectile Motion.

The last example I gave asked for the initial velocity and direction given the current velocity and direction at a certain time. So they had to learn to work backwards.

For their exercise, they had to get the maximum height and the horizontal displacement at that height, given just the initial velocity and angle.

One thing I forgot to mention last time was that during this time, we had a new Information Technology director show up to replace Sir Randy and the Officers In Charge after him, David and Xerxes. The problem is that he is only going to be here until May, then he has another job somewhere else. But at least he will be able to prop us up in preparation for the coming school year.

Now I’m into the ninth week of classes. In the first meeting of my Electromagnetic Theory students, I gave them three problems as practice for their upcoming quiz.

One was for integrating two half-circle conducting rods to get the electric field. Another needed the dot product to get the flux going through each face of a cube then the total. The last question uses integration again to solve for the potential for a charged circular arc.

I told them to form pairs for solving the problems. They were all able to answer the second question, which even for me was the easiest. Some solved the third problem. But they all had difficulty with the first item, which, after all was the first topic we discussed out of all three and would have been pushed back to the recesses of forgetfulness. I also told them that I would give them the final answers to the problems (not the solutions) after the class.

During lunch I could see that half of my students in that class (including my cousin) were in a meeting with Sir Ronnie about the Talent Quest. There was an ordered lunch for their meeting, and George the Student Council president for next term gave me one Styrofoam pack of the noodles, requesting that their quiz be moved to next week. Jane, one of the girls from the class, gave me a plastic cup of Coke with the same plea.

They didn’t know it until I had written down the questions on the board that I had concurred, and asked them to form pairs again, different from the ones that morning.

Two were new problems, one for getting the partial derivative of the potential to obtain the electric field, and another for getting the potential of a flat ring (using surface charge density this time instead of linear charge density).

I also still asked them to solve for the first problem, just to arrive at the answer I already gave them. In the end though I gave them the answers to all three questions so they would know if their solutions were correct, but I told them the exam would not be the same type.

I’ll talk about my Advanced Mathematics class next time, or my attempt at it, and my mechanics review/recitation/board work sessions. For now, class dismissed.