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

On Day Three of Week Five in Term One of the new school year, I had my first experiment in my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism laboratory class.

On the afternoon of the day before, I had posted the leader, secretary and individual report assignments for each group in the hallways. During the class I reminded them of the same things they were told about the prerequisite mechanics lab submissions: one week after the performance of the experiment, five percent per day bonus or deduction for early or late submissions, and incomplete requirements resulting in a failing grade.

I also warned them not to rush their work, because even if they submit it the same day as the experiment and get a thirty five percent bonus, if the paper is so rushed that it only gets twenty out of a hundred, it still leaves them with a total of twenty seven points, still failing.

Lastly I told them about laboratory demeanor, which is half of their group grade, and half of which comes from how the leader manages the members during the experiment. They would get a very low grade there if they were the last to finish.

They needed the slope of the two quantities that they had set or measured (one was constant; the experiment was Ohm’s Law). I refrained them from using the inaccurate (y2-y1)/(x2-x1) formula for getting the slope, but instead referred them to the method of least squares they were introduced to in mechanics lab. To make things easier, I turned on one of the computers, filled out the cells with the summations and products of the required columns, and told them it would be easier if they just encoded their data there.

It turned out that the student I assigned to write down the formula on the board copied one part wrong, so after they were getting percentages error in the thousands, I had to edit the formula.

It’s up to them to figure out that they could use that for all the computations they have to make.

One last gripe: Deiv still wasn’t doing anything in his group, and he was just hanging around until his classmates submitted their data notebook.

But it seemed he was the most prepared for the quiz, which the others forgot, arriving early without any advanced reading, while the rest just showed up late and were refused being given the quiz. Hard and fast rule: 10 points, first ten minutes of class. Although Deiv still had some difficulty coming up with a bit of analysis needed to answer some questions not found explicitly in the text.

I’ll park session 627 here. Class dismissed for now.