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 practical exam for my mechanics lab on the last day of the second to the last week of the second to the last trimester for this school year.

There was one experiment that no one drew: Uniform Acceleration.

There was only one student who got the piece of paper with the “x” that meant he could choose what experiment to have his exam on. And he didn’t do so well at that. He only got seventy percent.

I’m still deciding how many times in one class (or one term) I will use the “x” next term, because last time, around four of them randomly picked it, or if I’m going to announce that number.

I definitely am not announcing the existence of that paper at the start of the class, but I will let word of mouth do the work for me as soon as someone gets it.

At least these people were better prepared this time in remembering which experiment was which and which set up was which, partially because I did teach them to infer by process of elimination. After all, there are only seven tables and experiments to choose from.

None of them had to be offered a second guess as to which experiment was on which table.

Now on to my last regular lecture meeting for the term before I start with the finals: this was mechanics lecture.

Here I first gave them the rules for solving problems on horizontal friction, inclined friction, and mechanical energy.

The first one included providing the illustration of all the forces thoroughly, determining which axes to use, getting the components of the forces not along the chosen axes, writing the equations for the summations of forces, and using these along with all previously given equations to solve for the unknown.

In the second one, they only had to pick between four applicable scenarios (one of my favorite words in that class for this term): a dropped object, or given velocity straight up, or given a trajectory, or let slide down a frictionless plane. Oops, time out.

Session 907 is frictionless. Class dismissed.