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 second meeting of my Introduction to Electricity and Magnetism lecture class for the sixth week of the first term, they had their second exam.

I had given them a reviewer beforehand with several mistakes that I could say I intended so that they would try to solve the problems for themselves. But I still didn't want the exam to be end up being just plot the vector and sum them up, even in two dimensions.

This is because all the needed equations are already given to facilitate concentration of studies to the analysis of problems, not memorization.

So in one problem there were three charge distributions given, but their dimensions and distances from the central point had to be calculated from the figure with a cartesian grid, with an angle include that had to be determined using trigonometry.

Another problem, the one for conservation of charge, was taken directly from one of the examples given in class that used the quadratic formula, but with the quantities included changed.

There were more questions during the exam this time around, instead of blank faces, which I could as a minor victorious improvement.

But I still gave them a five minute extension, warning them that this left five minutes for those who were to have their lab afterwards just five minutes to review for the quiz at the start of that subject.

Now, for that quiz, some of the students were surprised that the questions were different from what they heard of (or asked) their friends from the first class held earlier in the week.

Another indication that the other class cannot be held separate from this one is that several students from that class stayed over and helped out in the second instance of the same experiment.

I thought therefore that for the coming weeks, I will switch around the schedules of experiments so that both classes will have the experience of being first in performing at least some of the procedures we have planned for the rest of the term.

Session 1193 doesn't know how to measure distances. Class dismissed.