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

I was talking about my mechanics lecture finals, which occurred on the first day of final exam.

The fourth question was another collision, but this time the objects did not stick together afterwards. Only the masses and the initial velocities were given to them. Therefore they have to use both the conservation of mechanical energy and conservation of linear momentum equations, and find the solution from the linear equations with two variables.

The last problem had an object moving down a slope, and thus falling under conservation of mechanical energy. At the bottom of the slope it hit another object at rest, which made it into a collision problem. For this again I provided an illustration.

I checked the problems with my co-teacher Miss Edna, who was handling one of the three classes. She had told her class the coverage of the exam started from vectors, and those were well represented in the exam, except for friction.

And just like with our Trigonometric Applications classes last term, I also divided the students along the lines of their relative achievement in the subject. That meant that all those who consistently scored low were in one room, and would get no results trying to copy from each other. Doesn’t mean they didn’t try though. In fact, my consistent mumbling cheater went so far as to sit in his front row chair sideways, thinking I couldn’t see him from two aisles away. At the very least I stopped him from wearing his reflective shades during the exam.

And at the very worst, I can just give him zero for that exam (like David used to for mere quizzes) because of his flagrant dishonest behavior.

Another noteworthy fact about the exam was that one student, Bobbie, who was in the other higher average room, who asked Miss Edna if she could go over to my room because she had a lot of questions. Her most surprising admission was that she just concentrated on Conservation of Mechanical Energy and Conservation of Linear Momentum so that she did not remember anymore how to solve the first problem using projectile motion. Talk about extremely short term memory, even given that we still used them in some examples way after I said they would not be part of the coverage of the succeeding exams.

Since I did not want to break up the momentum of talking about my mechanics lecture classes, it is only at this point that I will say that it was at 8am of that first day that I had my finals for my Advanced Mathematics class.

I just made their finals early that morning, because I left the book in the office. For their test paper I had to draw five graphs using spreadsheet software, and asked them to come up with the interval notation definition of the functions, and the spreadsheet software conditional statements, just like what we did during their last lecture session.

We extended beyond the two hour schedule, but I agreed to the overtime, as long as they did not mind the students of my mechanics classes coming in to consult for their exam that afternoon.

I’ll talk about the mechanics lab finals tomorrow. For now, class dismissed.