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

Fourth day of the first week of classes, first trimester: I continued with Chapter 1 of the textbook in my Mathematical Methods 1 class.

First, I specifically gave examples on adding expressions involving more than one variable, just so that they would be clear on how to solve those.

Then we went to the special products and afterwards we proceeded to the division of polynomials. Just like with multiplication, this one I categorized into operations with only one term and operations with more than one term.

Not only have I started giving them the mnemonic equations on a separate side of the board this early - such as a/b + c/d = (ad + bc)/bd – but I have also taken great care to list down the methods for them so that even when they just photocopy their classmates’ notes, they would still be able to read the rules on how to solve certain problems instead of just having to infer them from the examples, which is something I’ve had to do several times during tutorial session based on the students’ notebooks.

Of course, when the students in different subjects as me for help, I could just teach the methods I know, but being a teacher myself, I know that it is best to just follow the way the problems are taught to be solved, because that will be the easiest for the teacher to grade – and score highly.

Speaking of which, one student in this class – Dominic - asked if in the quizzes they have to show the same process that I gave. I told them that they are not required to if they know other methods of answering the questions, but the important thing is for them to show the COMPLETE solution of whatever they used to arrive at the final answer to get the full points.

I told them that I would definitely be suspicious of where answers given without solutions came from. But if they used a shortcut shown in class, they should just write in their test paper “by special product #1” or something similar.

This early there was also already at least one student complaining about the exercises given at the end of the class. I wonder if that is only how he feels because we are still in the review topics, or if he will air his inconvenience again when we get to the difficult lessons.

On to the next class, Differential Equations, I just let them fill in their course cards (which is also what I did at the start of the previous class, but with the additional help of telling them what to write under “Course Code” and “Degree Program” since they were freshmen). We would start the lesson proper with that next meeting.

In my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism class around an hour and a half later, I went into the first lecture, which I warned them was mostly storytelling about the history of electromagnetism, with only one equation given in the end.

When it came to solving problems with that one equation, two students I asked to answer the sample on the board whined that they didn’t know what to do. I warned them, jokingly of course, that if they were already having difficulties that early in the discussion, that maybe they should drop the course and shift majors.

And with that, session number 609 gets put to bed. Class dismissed.