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.

Big double-oh land mark post celebration today, on the day after the birthday of the brother who came after me, who, unfortunately, died at the age of 25 in 1996.

In my DIFEREQ class on the first day of the eleventh week of classes, the students actually approached me during my Mathematical Methods session beforehand to ask me to postpone the test, because they could not understand anything, which, obviously, is an exaggeration.

So I just had board work for the period again, even though I had prepared the exam two days prior.

We only got to solve three examples though, before time ran out. But what was ironic was that it wasn’t those who requested the rescheduling who stalled the solving. In fact, they were giving instructions from their seats to those who had not studied.

When I told some of my co-teachers about my frustration afterwards though, they just said at least the students now have the confidence to take the test that they apparently lacked at the start. Yeah, at the cost of an additional session, leaving us with one less for the rest of the term.

In my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism class afterwards, I gave them an example that we all solved together that combined Resistors in Series and Parallel and Kirchhoff’s Rules.

They had to get the equivalent resistances to simplify the circuit, solve for the unknown currents and then get the individual currents through each resistor. Again this was by board work.

We didn’t get to finish it though, so I gave it to them as an assignment, on top of the problem set from the quiz that they are supposed to submit a week after the test.

On the day after, in my Mathematical Methods One class, I started on Chapter Eleven (the second to the last chapter in the coverage for the term), Arithmetic Sequences and Series.

I gave them the equation for consecutive elements in the sequence given the common difference, and for getting the nth element.

If two of the elements and their places are given, they could solve for both the first element and the common difference by using system of two equations in two variables. I also showed them how to get several arithmetic means between two elements.

Session 700 reaches the end of its own sequence here. For now, class dismissed.