Monday, Dec 10
Physics: I said “genital relativity” instead of “general relativity”. Exactly once. It took a bit for the tittering to go down, and they were pretty good after that, but I was tomato red for a while. I could feel my ears burning up. Class didn’t get much better after that, but at least I did not say anything else embarrassing, and I didn’t make that mistake again.
Honors Physics: Sound! I brought in my fiddle, guitar, and mandolin today and even cut the nails on my left hand so I could vaguely play them. I’m super duper out of practice, but the students still clapped at my rendition of Jingle Bells on the fiddle. Woo! Good kids. The content was the math of standing waves and doing a compare/contrast with twi fixed ends vs one fixed and one free end. They were really challenged by looking for mathematical patterns and generalizing, but I thought it was valuable to go through the process. We also did beats and I showed them on the fiddle the difference between hearing beats vs hearing a really unfortunate interval. The last piece was me playing music box guts for them in the air, which they can almost hear, and then putting it down on the demo table as a sounding board. There were literal gasps of shock and murmurs of amazement. I promised we’d talk more about that tomorrow. This really is one of my most favoritest topics.
AP Physics: Moment of Inertia quiz, followed by gravity. I put into practice the introduction to field I did for the regular class a few weeks ago, and I think it went pretty well. We’ll see on Wednesday when we do some more discussion of the field and move on to potential.
