Chapter 4: Exploring Quantitative Data (Days 19-20)

Today is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. The LAUSD always closes for both of the High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It also closes for Admission Day -- but even though California was admitted as a state on September 9th, 1850, the district observes it on the Friday before Labor Day. Thus this year, the district observes a big five-day weekend from Friday to Tuesday.

Then again, none of this is relevant to me. My current district closes for neither Admission Day nor the Jewish holidays, and so this was just an ordinary three-day Labor Day weekend for me. And I spent this past weekend grading the exams in Stats and Calculus.

I have only a single guy in first period and four students in fifth period Stats, so only five students took the Chapter 3 Stats test. Of those five students, three of them scored 80 out of 100. There was also one girl who scored 70 (after having missed the first three weeks of school) and one guy who earned a 50. (He's a special ed student -- there's a meeting coming up soon to discuss possible accommodations for him.)

The one question that stumped the most students was to identify the marginal distribution of dog breeds from a contingency table. The original test (from the online test bank from the text) directs students just to circle the right column -- on Illuminate, I asked the students to state the rightmost column. Unfortunately, very few students were able to identify it. I give the same question again today as a Warm-Up. This takes us into Chapter 4, "Exploring Quantitative Data." The first six pages of this chapter cover histograms and stem-and-leaf diagrams. The students learn how to graph histograms on the TI-84.

Interestingly enough, the Calculus test produced almost the exact same distribution -- three 80's, a 65 score, and a 45 score (with one absence). Based on how I (unwittingly) set up the test in Illuminate, Part 1 of the test was worth 12 points and Part 2 of the test was worth 8 points, to give 20 total (which I then multiplied by five to produce a 100-point test). The question that stumped the most students was on logarithms -- using the laws to rewrite ln (x^2) as 2 ln x. Again, I make this question my Warm-Up.

Then I proceed with Chapter 2 of the text. Section 2.1 introduces the tangent and velocity problems (and using slopes of secant lines to estimate slopes of tangent lines), while 2.2 introduces limits. I cover the second section today since the first is so short. Still, there is a lot of information to get through. I end up not using markers/whiteboards during the lesson, but perhaps I should have. Old habits break hard -- I must get in the habit of using markers to check for understanding, especially during long lessons. (I was thrown off by using TI's, not markers, in Stats.) The one girl who was absent comes in today at lunch to study for the test -- she'll make it up Thursday. Of course, the guy who scored 45 wants to retake his exam as well (and I will likely let him, since I'm making it up for the absent girl anyway). One guy who scored 80 is also disappointed -- his goal is to get into an engineering school, and 80 just won't cut it.

Tomorrow is an even day, and so it's a tweeting day for Ethnostats. We didn't quite complete the Stats Scrapbook on Friday, and so we'll do it tomorrow. Then I'll return to the main text for this class with the stem-and-leaf diagrams.

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