What I Learned From First Semester...

I can't believe that first semester has gone by so fast. So this is what I've learned:
Blake and Da Freitas have some crazy adventures.
Jose and Pierre are Panaraguan (sp?) revolutionaries, but they died. :(
Singing songs is a good way to learn physics, especially if it's Freitas on guitar.
Calculator= spaceship
Bored is spelled two different ways: bored and board.
Sheila is an Amazon, and piranha-men don't like her.
We go through a lot of SPAM and Nutter Butters in this class.
Da Freitas has an Ozone-Mobile, and it's kinda massive.
There are rainbows that marbles can drive on.
Fig Newtons are delicious.
Mass is not weight.
If a fly and a bus collide, it is the same force for both of them.
Batman and Chuck Norris are physicists.
There are a lot of unknown planets out there that have different gravities other than earth.
"Earth" is spelled "URTH"
Mr. Blake is secretly a Jamaican man "Da Whole Ting."
He also had a sensei that called him "Bureku-san" and taught him the secret "Bureku technique."
We like to do problems with cars, trains, boats, and boxes in them.
Roller coasters are really fun!
Pulleys secretly have one string, so one string = one tension.
Bowling ball pendulums can't hurt you if you let them go... as long as you don't PUSH them.
Mr. Blake can swing on a bowling ball pendulum.
A lot of kids like to play Tetris Battle during class.
I sit in the back row and sometimes it's hard to see the board.
You shouldn't procrastinate on your PAs— even though they're due in a week, you somehow put them off til the night before.
Keana and I eat some good snacks: swedish fish, cheetos, fruit, chocolate, etc.
Austin draws a lot in class.
Mr. Blake is also a DJ and Konia 209 is a club.
You should stand when Mr. Freitas enters the room and tell him "Good morning."
There are a lot of kinematics equations to remember and I still haven't memorized them all.
This class is the best physics class... I feel so lucky! :)

Energy

So this week's topic is ENERGY. The first thing we learned about energy is that it involves work ("DO WORK, SON"), but not the kind of work you might be thinking about. Work is the average force multiplied by the length or distance an object is pushed or pulled. Work comes in *Joules*, which are equivalent to Newton x mass. We learned about the law of Conservation of Energy, which is basically the same thing as Conservation of Momentum: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it only changes forms. Energy is also a SCALAR, which means that it does not depend on direction, just magnitude (no negatives found here!) There are two kinds of energies; potential energy and kinetic energy. Potential energy is the energy in a still object (equivalent to the product of mass, gravity, and height). Kinetic energy, on the other hand, is the energy of motion (equivalent to the product of 1/2 mass and velocity squared). We are going to be doing a lab on Monday, so we'll literally get to see energy in motion.