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

Last time I was talking about my DIFEREQ class on the fourth day of the fifth week of classes for Trimester One of the new school year. I had taught them how to distinguish homogeneous from non-homogeneous equations. Now this they had to apply in a continuation of our previous topic, which is still the solution of differential equations of order one.

If they could not use the easiest method, separation of variables, then, if the terms multiplied to the differentials are homogeneous, they could substitute a third variable, y = vx, to get expressions that are separable.

I had written down the solution to one example on the board, but they were having difficulty understanding it. The bad thing was that most of their questions were on the integration side, which, at that point, I was assuming they had already mastered.

It just goes to show that a lot, if not all, of them squeaked through INTCALC by the barest of margins, and that they would sooner forget the whole course than have to go through them again.

In my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism lecture class afterwards, I started on Gauss’ Law and electric flux.

The students admitted to being already familiar with the dot and the cross product, so that made my job easier in explaining the application to our previous topic: electric field.

I only got as far as spherical symmetry of the Gaussian surface for an enclosed point charge though, but at least I was able to show them the analysis for an imaginary cube in an electric field, which is the easiest shape to imagine and compute dot products for.

On the next day I had the fourth quiz in Mathematical Methods One. This time I assigned them specific seats according to the alphabetical order of their last names, since I did not want them getting too comfortable with their usual seatmates, especially with the topics becoming more and more difficult as the term progresses.

I forgot to mention that I also did this in my DIFEREQ and INTEMAG classes. Since there were twenty students and sixteen two-seat tables, only the four front tables had two occupants each. The rest had one student per table. Not that they could have copied off each other though, from the reaction during and after the tests.

I gave them four problems they had to solve by factoring, two by completing the square and two by quadratic equations. The word problems, four of them, they could solve by any method.

I’ll cut session 629’s thread here. For now, class dismissed.