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.

In my first mechanics lecture of the ninth week of classes for the second term, I started on the topic of forces in two dimensions (or Newton’s Second Law of Motion), since forces is one dimension is already incorporated in there somewhere.

I just was able to give examples on summation of forces along the horizontal plane, as seen from the top view.

At the start I showed them that since we only have one new equation introduced (summation of forces is equal to the product of the mass and the acceleration along the same axis), that means that we have to “recycle” equations from the previous topic, especially those about getting the x and y components of vectors (this time forces and not velocity and displacement) and getting the resultant magnitude and direction.

From there I also related it to the equations of constant acceleration that we have taken up before, which also still apply. So they saw that once more, just like in their mathematical methods one and trigonometry classes, it is important to know the fundamentals to be able to understand the advanced topics.

I had to stop there though, because in the middle of the lecture the students asked that we have a review instead on the coverage of the quiz on the next meeting, which is projectile motion.

So I got several examples from the textbook (which I had to borrow from one student because I did not bring my copy, making up examples for forces on the spot to suit my needs).

This time I concentrated on the second and the third scenario, which have a projectile being released with only horizontal velocity, or with a negative downward angle.

But before that I asked students to list down the pertinent equations on the right side of the board for our early reference.

Here I already saw that some of the students had a difficult time getting to which equations I was referring.

I mused openly that if this meant they were not reviewing simply because I was providing the equations in the tests, then maybe I should take out that privilege to force them to review and at least be familiar with the equations and when to use what.

Of course there was a clamor against this, and proclamations that they prefer to have more time for studying than memorizing the equations.

Session 853 forgot the equations.