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 fourth day of the eleventh week of classes for the first term of the new school year, in my Mathematical Methods One class we talked about what the mean means, which is middle and average.

So I attempted to derive the middle for any two given elements of an arithmetic series, then verified that it could be the case regardless how many elements there were between the first and the last element given.

When the formula had been verified, which most of them already knew from fundamental statistics, then I used it for the second meaning of mean, which is average. From there, given the number of elements, they have the relationship between the mean and the sum of all the elements.

That ended the topic on arithmetic sequences, right in time for the next quiz. I’ll start on the geometric sequences next time.

After that, we finally had the third long exam in the Differential Equations class. I was a little peeved at the students because their teacher in the Mechanics One class the period before, even though he is only part-time and goes to the school twice a week, extended his class to eat of five of the minutes allotted to me.

I told the students (even though the other teacher had asked them if they had a class in the next subject and they said it was a quiz) that it was their responsibility to make sure their class ended on time. If they were expecting me to extend the time since I was also their teacher in the next class, they were mistaken.

Less than twenty minutes into the test, though, I relented and let them open their notes, on the condition that there would be no sharing of notes and there would be no more questions entertained.

Not that that stopped them, but I did reply to most with “that was discussed in class, so it should be in your notes”. Also, I allowed open books, although I drew the line when one students wanted to step out and borrow a book from the library.

“Imagine,” one student remarked afterwards when they told him about our test, “What considerations you guys would have gotten if you had not treated him so badly.”

In Electricity and Magnetism lecture class afterwards, I gave them another problem in Kirchhoff’s Rules, this time with a circuit in the shape of a tetrahedron. So we’ve pierced the third dimension, and took up a record of six unknown currents to solve.

Session 704 just stops short of piercing any dimension here. Class dismissed.