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

Immediately before my mechanics lecture finals (the secretary thought it would be easier for the students to have just one review in similar topics when she scheduled them together) Miss Edna had the one-hour finals of her mechanics lab classes.

The first part of her exam had the deceptively easy appearance of having two statements per experiment, then choosing one of four answers depending on whether both, neither, the first or the second were true.

For this, even with students copying from one another, a little doubt will creep in as to whether their assessment of the concepts is accurate or not.

The second part had essay questions, asking about the principles behind certain aspects of some experiments.

Here, I had the misfortune of being the proctor for Deiv, who, not surprisingly, asked very specific details about the essay, which he could have just written down comprehensively in order to cover all the possible scenarios Miss Edna could be looking for.

The last part asked for the full name of the lab technician, just to see if the students were aware of someone who they interacted with for the whole term.

There were some students who asked me for this fact in the middle of the exam, thinking maybe I did not read the questions – bad assumption on their part.

Now I reach another set of teacher rules that I mentioned before, applying this time to the class of Analytical Geometry that I found out when one of my former students in the prerequisite subject asked me for help in studying for their finals.

Their teacher, Miss Noelle, does not allow calculators in the exams, despite having to deal with trigonometric expressions most of the time.

So all the students have to given their answers in exact (or whole number and fractional) form, including the angles they get, which then have to be in radians and not in degrees.

This I could understand, but she also does not require the students to rationalize radical signs in the denominator, a very important standard practice that we have tried to inculcate in the students since Mathematical Methods 1.

Miss Edna, in her Differential Calculus class, for thirty percent of the students’ grade outside of the finals, asked her students to submit 25 original and unique questions with solutions based on five topics they covered during the term.

When the student presents the paper to her, she then will ask five questions based on any of the problems, which of course requires that the student know how all the problems were solved. But at least, they do not have to answer them from scratch. The solutions they also presented are there to aid their memory of the analysis along.

I let some students overhear that I might do the same thing for my next mechanics lecture class, and they were very apprehensive.

That’s it for today. I’ll continue tomorrow. Class dismissed.