Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

For now I'll start with the events today then work backwards.

In my mechanics lecture class I had the recitation that I promised them after there were people who were still asking about the basic concepts during our exam last Thursday.

I concentrated with most of the questions from the topics of conservation of mechanical energy and friction, but I still put in some basic concepts such as the units of the quantities we use most often, constant velocity, constant acceleration and projectile motion.

We took up probably half of the class time since I had to call almost everyone twice when they (including David's brother Daniel) couldn't answer my first questions correctly.

After that I just wrote down the answers to the exam on the board, and there were no questions about it from them, although I noticed that there were some people who didn't copy the solutions down.

I told them that our next topic would be conservation of linear momentum. There was actually one student who asked if that was the topic of external forces and how it affects the equations of energy I promised them before, but I said that was a topic further down the road.

In my Trigonometric Applications class I discussed Sum and Difference of Two Angles and Double Angle Identities.

From there I gave three types of problems they would encounter, starting from the one where one function each for two angles is given, and they have to find the function of either the sum or difference of those two angles.

In the exercise in fact there were some people who were confused that they were now dealing with the x, y and r of two angles instead of one.

I also had to review them again on how to simplify expressions involving operations with fractions, for which they still have trouble remembering when to cancel terms and when not to.

The second type of problem required that I discuss the trigonometric functions of the quadrantal angles first, because this is the one where they could simplify the trigonometric function of either the sum or the difference ofan unknown angle and a special angle - sometimes quadrantal - to just a function of the unknown angle.

The third type was the same as the proving of equations that they had before, except that now they had to use more identities on top of the ones they had to memorize before - although I already told them that they do not have to memorize these ones.

Next time I'll discuss with them the half angle, product to sum and sum to product identities.

One student was surprised that he said I was rushing the lecture. Besides the fact that it was our first meeting in two weeks time, it's already the eleventh week of classes and I know how much material we still have to cover.

The students asked about the results of their long exam. They had to be content with the scores of their last fifty-point quiz though, because I said that just like what I did in the quiz - which was now over seventy six instead of over fifty - I was still in the process of adjusting the point system of the exam.

Why was it important that I adjust the point system of the quiz, they asked. So that they could have more partial points on some of the items, I said.

I guess they were satisfied with this because some people had higher scores than their previous average because of this.

At one point in the lecture they were already asking for the exercise, probably not because they were eager to answer, but because they didn't want any more examples. Since there were still more than thirty minutes left in the session, I told them that the exercise I would give would be four numbers instead of the usual one or two.

They complained, of course, so we compromised that I had one more example before giving them three items in their exercise.

Surprisingly, there were more students who consulted here. I don't know if the fact that they are desperate to learn the concepts and pass the course this close to the end of the term has anything to do with it.

And that's it for today. I'll discuss everything from the Mathematical Methods 1 class this morning all the way back to the mechanics lab last Wednesday I was talking about last in the last post in the succeeding entries.

Class dismissed.