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 the meeting of my general science requirement mechanics lab class for the eighth week of the third term, we performed the experiment on Newton’s Second Law of Motion.

As usual, there were some students who forgot to heed the warning about not wearing open toed sandals to class. Sometimes I wonder if it would be easier to just program automatics email, instant messenger and cellular phone messages to them a week before and a few days before the event for them to be able to remember assignments, just as certain web groups used to have back when I was active as a manager.

I also changed the two sets of weights they had to use for the five trials, starting with two values that were forty grams apart then just taking away twenty grams from the lighter weight and adding it to the heavier weight until I had five pairs of values.

This is because I remembered from last term that with the current pulleys that we have, that are not even remotely considered frictionless, putting two weights that are just twenty grams apart in numeric value would result in the pulley not working at all as if the weights were equal. I also added the instruction to them that they can take more than three trials, and record only the three that are closest together.

The students also discovered for themselves what the previous classes have thought of to insert the hook through the holes in some of the lighter weights first so that they do not have to pick up all the weights at the end of each trial and the heavier weight strikes the ground and the lighter weight hits the pulley, resulting in most of the weights flying off the pans.

They didn’t think to try to catch the higher weight though after it had passed their starting and finishing indicator (somewhere near the pulley at the top of the stand where the heavier weight was first placed), which was what some of my previous classes did so that they do not have to replace the weights for each trial.

There was also one student who only then realized that the I-Pod he always had placed in his ears since the start of the term apparently contained a timer. Otherwise their group, all of whom did not have timers in their phones would have had to borrow from another group.

Session 1021 has no timer. Class dismissed.