Student "edition" found at {csi dot journalspace dot com}.

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

I was talking about the Science Fiction Literature session on the fifth day of the sixth week of classes.

Some of the students were already thinking about the first of their films leading into the second one. That was when I reminded them that even though we are emphasizing the speculative part of their story, it still should have a proper beginning, conflict and resolution which isn’t incidental.

For their next meeting the group reports where they would talk about an assigned short story that are from the different categories listed would start.

On the first day of the seventh week of classes, in my Mathematical Methods One lecture, we finished with the third and fourth method of solving systems of equations in two variables of degree one.

These are the elimination method and the two-by-two determinants method.

For the third one I had to give all possible scenarios. If the coefficients of one of the variables in both equations are equal but opposite in sign, they can just add the two equations like when J = K and M = N, then J + M = K + N.

If the coefficients are equal but of the same sign, they have to multiply one of the equations by negative one.

If one of the coefficients is a multiple of the other, the equation with the smaller coefficient has to be multiplied so they would have the same coefficient – again still opposite in sign.

If the coefficients are not multiples of one another (for both variables) then they could just multiply each equation with the coefficient of the other for the smaller pair of coefficients, so that they would still come out equal and eliminable.

It was recommended they take the smaller pair of numbers because having larger numbers more often than not leads to more mistakes in computation.

For the determinants method, I first started with the two equations in standard form and moved the coefficients to the right side (for the standard form, the right side is zero).

From this we used the substitution method to end up with one expression with one variable. Based on the position of the coefficients here (and in the expression for the second variable) it was obvious to see that the equations for x and y could be given as two two-by-two matrices in fraction form.

I’ll continue with this discussion next time. For now I’ll have to call lights out on session 636. Class dismissed.