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

Last time I was talking about my first mechanics lecture sessions for the tenth week of classes in the third trimester.

As I mentioned before, I had not erased the notes, examples and solutions that I had written on the earlier period. So I just “breezed” through them during the succeeding session, which, after all, I had already reset to the same room.

And from experience, I know how fast a lesson can go when everything is already written on the board (or on projection, for that matter). This is no matter how complex the subject is and how many questions the students ask in an attempt to understand.

I don’t think it is a factor of my being impatient either. If anything, it is tantamount to being more tolerant of their questions knowing what the previous class had already asked of the same topic.

That is also taking into consideration the fact that I clearly went over with them the example of a light monkey and a heavy log on opposite ends of a rope looped over a tree branch, with the log on the ground. Without grabbing on to anything other than the rope, the less massive monkey still has a chance of lifting the weightier log off the ground – by accelerating up the rope.

Even though I could not prove it to them physically, we were able to show it with the equations.

I also expected them to get the example faster because I mentioned the similarity of the situation to their experiment in the laboratory on Atwood’s Machine. In fact, in the end we derived the equation they used in that experiment.

But we were still done with the whole topic on the board faster than the earlier class. This, I can only account to not having to write the whole thing on the board anymore. So there was one more example in that class than in the previous class.

The examples I discussed (whether I intended it or not) only used examples of tension and weight in one dimension (in other words, vertical tension).

Looking at my lesson plan belatedly, I realized that I was supposed to restrict myself to either up-down or left-right motion and go forward to examples with tension at an angle (obviously not weight) for the next meeting.

I also had to emphasize to them that unlike with free fall motion, here, it was possible for the acceleration along the vertical to be other than gravity since the object was now tethered to something that will affect its motion up or down.

The last example I gave them was the physically not recommended situation where a guy on a platform pulls himself up by a pulley attached to the platform and looped to a rope on the ceiling, because if he lets go of the rope, obviously he will fall to the ground. But it did already show them it was possible to have two upward tensions on an object, with the force being half that amount.

That’s all for now. I’ll talk about the Talent Quest, my Advanced Mathematics session, another questionable teacher practice I’ve heard about and more next time. Class dismissed.