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

I was talking about my Mathematical Methods 1 class for the second day of classes for the second week of classes for the first term of the new school year.

From discussing division on rational expressions at the start of the class I went to addition and subtraction. Here we stalled, because there were several questions as to how we got the least common denominator from the factors of the denominators of the addend expressions, that I had to review them on how to get the LCD from addition of integer fractions, explicitly listing down the rules once more.

This was because just based on the one example I wrote down (but again probably a lot weren’t paying attention but only tried to comprehend carefully following what was written on the board belatedly). They asked who a certain factor was written twice and why another one was written only once.

I had to specify the rules that said factors common to more than one denominator are only written in the LCD once, after which the remaining factors are included.

From here I went to rational exponents, which should be easy for them because it is just a combination of two previous topics: rational expressions and operations on integer exponents.

That leaves me with just Properties of Radicals and Set of Complex Numbers to discuss for this chapter, although I’m thinking they would not be included in the quiz at the end of the second week.

In the afternoon, I attended the Science Fiction Literature class for the first time. I was put on the spot about my definition of science fiction, I gave them an idea of what I considered to be good and bad science fiction (somehow misheard by one of the students as “real” and “fake” science fiction when he put the question back to me*). Asked for some known specimen, I was stopped at this point by my co-teacher Rae because she said they were supposed to be able to discern that for themselves later in the term after the distinction had been given clearly.

I was asked about my favorite science fiction movie, and off the top of my head I answered “The Abyss” by James Cameron before he make a rock too heavy for him to lift with “Titanic”. Ditto books, and I answered the “Dune” series by Frank Herbert.

I also gave them my opinion that I think the word plausibility, more than possibility and probability, describes science fiction.

Running out of things to say, I also admitted that it was Rae who submitted the original proposal to teach the subject, although technically I have a wider knowledge of the field than she does.

Next time (when I am not ambushed to speak in front of the class less than half an hour before it begins) I will tell them that what separates a science fiction story from something they may be able to read in the newspapers can be boiled down to a “what if”.

For my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism lab class on the third day of the second week of classes, I asked for a new list of groupings, since I had twenty students instead of a maximum sixteen like I thought last week.

Because there were also not enough volunteers for our transportation and I wasn’t up to reserving the school shuttle, the field trip to the electronics shop to buy the equipment they would need for the experiments, I just gave it as an assignment of the groups to bring next meeting. These are the alligator clips, wires (of course, to hold them together), a soldering iron, soldering lead and a stand for their iron. I told them their activity for next meeting is soldering and testing the connections.

And with that session 613 terminates. For now, class dismissed.

* This is the same student who also asked if it was possible for good science fiction to also be comedic, and if so, could I give an example. The easiest one to cite, of course, is “Futurama”.