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

Third day of the fourth week of classes, first trimester, school year 2005-6: in my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism Laboratory class, we took up VOM Familiarization and Resistor Value Reading.

There were only two units available, so I had the groups merge for this one. It was only afterwards that I found out that the order had already come in for new meters, but the technician (who is primarily concerned with the science and not the engineering lab room equipment anyway) didn't know about them. But the older students do.

Each group still had to submit separate data sheets, even though the contents were basically the same.

Deiv, who my co-teacher who handled the Introduction to Robotics class last term had already berated for just signing the attendance sheet at the start then leaving, this time asked if he could leave before his group was finished with their report. At least he requested permission, although I had to gently decline. Hopefully he does study the manual at home as he asserts, and will be able to understand the concepts and procedures concerned before the start of the experiments next meeting. After all, I do sympathize with his predicament of not getting any hands on work in this activity because there were at least nine other people gathered around the set up at the table with him.

On the day after that, I finished with word problems in my Mathematical Methods 1 class, dealing with work and alternate scenario problems (with such analytical phrases as “had two people voted differently, another venue for the field trip would have won”, again dismissing them early when there were no more questions to the examples I gave, rather than adding to the coverage of the quiz the next day.

I decided to give my Differential Equations class the day off, because I knew that most of them would be reviewing - or to be more accurate, cramming – for the Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism lecture exam in the period afterwards. I did not want to face a class and lecture them on a new topic (with their own exam in that subject in the next meeting) and have them distracted and concentrating on another subject, albeit still one I was handling. Worst case scenario, I ask for questions and someone raised his or her hand to bring up the other subject.

There were only six questions in their exam after all, dealing with forces between two particles in one dimension, between three particles in two dimensions, ditto for electric field of one particle in one dimension and of two particles in two dimensions, and field due to a ring and due to a disk. There was no question about the electric dipole, but there will be in the next exam.

I'll cork session 623 here for now. Class dismissed.