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

I was talking about the middle of the first day of the second week of classes, where I had to take time off from my classes to deal with the annual medical exam. I was rushed through the whole process because thankfully, the school nurse let me cut in line ahead of the others (most of whom were integrated school teachers who, of course, did not have any classes yet – I wonder if they will make a big issue out of it again).

The whole process still took some forty minutes though, and it was exactly noontime when I returned to my students in our designated classroom for Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism.

Surprisingly, they were still there, most of them – that is. So with fifty minutes left on the clock I started the lecture on electrostatic forces in a system with three or more particles, dealing first with one dimension.

In retrospect, even though my first example was of an electron and two protons in a straight line, they may have been confused that I didn’t substitute the numeric value of the constant k and the electron charge e, and just gave the final forces in terms of those two values. I also didn’t convert the millimeter distance between the particles.

There also seemed to be still come difficulty on their part about understanding the direction of the force based on whether it was attractive or repelling.

I was all set to proceed to forces in two dimensions when they asked for a second example.

This time I gave four particles along the x axis whose values were given as integer multipliers to the value of the electron charge. Since this meant that there are twelve individual forces acting (three from each particle and three affecting each particle) I started calling people to perform the board work computation for the forces. After that, they also had to get the four summation forces.

It still took longer than I thought. They weren’t finished with the forces affecting the first two particles near the end of the already shortened period. So I told them that the rest of the problem would be their assignment.

On the second day of the second week of classes for the first trimester, in my Mathematical Methods 1 class I entered the room to find that the announcement for the application period for candidates for class representative to the student council had been posted, on the side of the chalk board farthest from the door.

The deadline for the filing is the end of the fourth week of classes, so the students have more than two weeks to decide, and the aspiring political parties also have that long to try and recruit their bets. The blank forms, according to the announcement, could be gotten from me, but in fact they were available from the newly assigned secretary of Sir Ronnie in the student affairs office.

In fact, one of the students who is part of the Election Committee asked why they were not included in the leadership seminar held two weeks before the start of classes. It seems that was oversight on my part as well, which will definitely be corrected for the plans next school year.

But back to my lecture: I discussed the rest of the operations on rational expressions, continuing with division, which is just one step away from multiplication, so it was almost like what they learned (or so I hope) last meeting.

I’ll have to cut my story short here though, and resume next time. Session 612, just like the “Star Wars” saga is complete. Class dismissed.