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 third meeting of my Mathematical Methods class for the third week of the first term (actually, the last time I lectured to them), we talked about rational exponents, or numbers and variables raised to a fraction, which is the same as asking for the roots or similar factors of the number.

This was after we cleared up the mistakes I noticed from the previous exercise, which I asked some students with correct answers to write on the board.

Unfortunately, I noticed from the new exercise that they had the same problem applying the concepts with rational exponents, not knowing when they are supposed to add or multiply exponents (for a variable) and when they have to get the roots (for a number). But since it was my last session with them it's up to the new teacher to practice them some more on it now.

For my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism lecture class, we had the first exam, where I not only found some students learning their metric prefixes, but they did not even review on how to get the electrostatic force for a sphere and a shell (which is the same as the first formula) and they were expecting me to provide it. Laziness strikes again.

For the student who did have the wrong prefixes, I told him I will tell him the right numeric values for a deduction, since otherwise all his answers will be wrong. After a lot of complaints and attempts at bargaining for a lower minus, eventually he agreed.

There were also still some students who were asking me for units, which I did not answer. Maybe I will ask for a table of these for the next test, just to prevent questions to me about it.

Why did I start of with such a self-admittedly difficult test, when they were probably expecting just direct substitution problems?

So that they would take the subject seriously this early, and strive more to understand the concepts instead of trying to wing it, which seems to be their first instinct the past year.

Session 1161 still got a low score in the post-lecture exercise. Class dismissed.