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 Electromagnetic Theory class, we have reached the discussion on electric potential and thus equipotential surfaces.

Here I had them recall that equipotential lines (in two dimensions) are always perpendicular to electric field lines so that for a point charge, the latter are all radiating from the point, while the potential is all in concentric cirles with the same vertex at the point. For a rod of charge, the electric field lines are radiating from the rod and along parallel planes.

The equipotential surfaces are therefore now in the form of concentric tubes.

For a sheet of charge, the electric field lines are all parallel to each other perpendicular to the plane, while the equipotential surfaces are parallel to the original plane. Afterwards I gave them the method for plotting the equipotential lines alongside the electric field lines I showed them in the graphing software before, but this time I could not show them the computer because there was no projector available.

It was probably a bit more difficult for them to try to imagine, after the previous spoonfeeding by mathematical charts.

In the next session after that one, we returned to solving for the potential at a certain point due to various continuous charge distributions, starting with several points from a rod of charge.

For this one, they realized on their own when I gave them their exercise that they did not have to get the translation angle for the summation they got, since the summation was of scalars and not of vectors.

At this point I also noticed that a certain student was paying more attention because I just drew the illustrations on the board but didn't write down the explanation. For once I saw him writing down what I was saying and not just what was on the board.

He was also answering the questions I asked the class, particularly those that had to do with the previous introduction to electricity and magnetism topics. He still could not get correct answers for any questions I had on integrals - although he did try, and I still gave the right answers instead.

Session 1545 is finally changing, after half a term of conditioning. Class dismissed.