Slippery roads today...

There were quite a few students either absent or late today, due to weather - there isn't much snow, but the freezing rain made the roads a challenge. Many of the buses were late, so attendance in first hour physics was rather low. Today's physics work was reviewing for their test tomorrow. The test is going to cover circular motion and universal gravitation. I looked over the test that Mr. Ambrose is planning to give, after class was over, and I think that it's fair; the students who have been working hard and doing the homework should do just fine on it. After the test, they're going to move on to energy.

In Ms. Colwell's algebra class, they learned how to use matrices to solve systems of linear equations; then, while most students took a quiz, I took one of the students aside who had been absent and wasn't taking the quiz, and went over some of the material he had missed. He hadn't been there when they learned how to solve equations by linear combination, so we went through those problems. First I set up and solved one, then I gave him a problem with slightly different numbers for him to do; then I set up a slightly different problem, more complex, and did the same thing. By the end of the class period, he seemed to be catching on pretty well. He'll still need practice, of course, but that's true of everything.

The students in both classes have gotten to know me fairly well by now, and they're more comfortable just talking. I had mentioned to them, several times, the need to do a "sanity check" and gave an example of how it had helped me to catch an error that could have haunted me down the road in my own work. I had to re-do a fairly big bunch of derivations, but at least I knew where the algebra started going wrong. One of the algebra students said that sounded frustrating, and asked how I kept wanting to do it. It was a serious question, so I told him the truth; that I did occasionally have days when I DIDN'T want to. Everyone has days when nothing goes right and it would be easy to just quit trying. Sometimes work doesn't go right, and the world as a whole seems terribly dark and pointless. But if I do my work right, it will make a difference - if I can develop a better method of doing something, that matters. I told him about the pleasure, when I was working in industry, of seeing a machine that was just sketches on paper at one point turn into a real, physical thing - and that in a special way, it was MINE, regardless of who it was actually sold to. I told him about the special feeling of realizing something that quite likely no one had seen before, looking up at the stars in the quiet night sky, and thinking that at that moment, you know some small thing that no one else does. The rewards are more than worth the difficulties, in the end. I don't know if he totally understood what I was trying to describe, but if he gets a little bit of it, maybe he'll gain more of a joy in learning.