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 first day of the twelfth week of classes for the first term of the new school year.

In my last class for that day, Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism, since I did not want to start to a new and the last topic, which is magnetic fields as they were going to be taking that up in the laboratory – also as their last experiment - two school days hence (first time, I think, in the term that the lecture was ahead of the lab in the topics), I just gave them time to finish their assignment given two meetings before about finding the individual currents through the resistors in series-parallel combinations within loops and multi-branch nodes that have to be applied with Kirchhoff’s Rules.

Besides this extension of the deadline to the end of the period, the only other concession I made was that they could now write their answers in decimal form, instead of in exact fractional form, because somehow, they were getting answers with numerators and/or denominators in the millions, which even their scientific calculators (only pocket sized, after all) could not handle.

In the next day, in my Mathematical Methods One class, I started on the last topic for Chapter 11, which was the Binomial Theorem and Pascal’s Triangle, for getting the expansion of polynomials with only two terms raised to exponents of three and above.

Of course there was also another more shortcut method for getting individual terms, but I left that as an Easter egg (to grab a computer software term) for those who bothered to review from the textbook. Besides, I did tell them that they could use any method for solving the problem, including the long method.

And on the day after that, in my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism lab class, at the start I gave them a quiz that, unlike the questions I had posed in previous meeting, was eighty percent about the materials.

Of course, this was actually a consideration to them since during the lecture class two days earlier, I told them to bring to class bare copper wire in coil form, a directional compass and a hundred grams of iron filings.

At the same time, the technician for the laboratories had already laid out the materials on the ledge for them to borrow, which I could not prevent them from looking at, even if I told them not to go near it.

I also couldn’t believe they had difficulty with the last two questions, which was that magnetic field was produced and produces (blank) on a (blank). The correct answer was current on a wire.

But I’ll continue ranting about this next time. Session 710 itself (blanks) out at this point. Class dismissed.