Day 81: Dielectrics and Oh, Yea, I Have a Blog

It was our first day back, and I wanted to give them some time to rejoin as a class before we jumped in. I allowed them to tell "cow" stories, which are those somewhat random stories that students tell that only seem tangentially related to what we're talking about in class.

Then we reviewed a little bit about polarization and charge separation. Then I introduced the last concept for circuits: what happens when you put an insulator between the two plates of a capacitor? We used the PHeT simulation again to visualize what's going on, and we summarized our results. Then we worked on some problems together. It wasn't the most productive day, but I feel we gelled back together as a class, and that's important too.