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.

On the third day of the tenth week of classes, I gave the students a last-minute reprieve and postponed our experiment on galvanometers until the next meeting. I didn’t announce it the day before, despite having already planned it, because I wanted students who showed up to get a bonus just for signing the attendance.

I also required each group to buy specific fuses for the multi-meters we use in class, which they have been getting busted from improper use in the experiments at a faster rate than expected since the start of the term.

I agree with my engineering co-teacher that we have to get better brands of meters, but at the same time, I believe they would only learn to appreciate their equipment after they have constructed their own, from available kits just like I did in high school.

The day after, during my Mathematical Methods One schedule they had their ninth quiz, about the first few types of partial fractions as I mentioned last time.

I made their quiz eight items, but I realized belatedly that the last question not only was missing an exponent, it was also of degree four, which I had only teased them the previous meeting about including, because it meant having to deal with four equations in four unknowns. In the only such example I solved in class, the whole solution took more than a third of the whole chalk board.

So I made the last item a bonus, that they could get fifty points just from solving the first seven problems.

Now, as to whether I gave them another one point bonus and had each item be worth seven points, I haven’t decided yet. Maybe different point values depending on the number of numerators to solve for.

Also, since the main computer in the faculty room was reformatted earlier in the week, our word processor has not yet been installed with the equation editor. So I actually had to make the fractions in their quiz by using tables with mostly invisible borders and center justified.

In the DIFEREQ class succeeding, I just wrote two more examples on integration by inspection on the board, then devoted the rest of the period for their review in the Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism lecture in the next period.

I gave them another example on the board on getting the total potential and total potential energy of a system of particles.

I will continue this tale next time. Session 696’s fuse has blown out at this point. Class dismissed.