Chapter 4: Exploring Quantitative Data, Continued (Day 23)

Today in Stats, we continue with the next three pages in Chapter 4, "Exploring Quantitative Data." These pages cover quartiles, the interquartile range, and the 5-number summary. I decide to follow Sarah Carter's suggestion of starting with a different dot plot each day. Today's dot plot is on the number of hours of sleep last night. But the idea of doing sleep hours, as opposed to some other quantitative data, comes not from Carter, but from the Ethnostats lesson set up two years ago.

Indeed, now that I finally have some of those lessons, my general Stats and Ethnostats classes are now starting to diverge. As usual, I'll focus more on the general Stats classes here, and save Ethnostats lessons for Twitter. Yet both classes contribute to the sleep hours dot plot. My classes are so small, and so I want to collect data from all my Stats classes in order to get more information. In general Stats, I begin with the Warm-Up and aforementioned dot plot. Then I move on to the new material on quartiles. This lesson naturally lends itself to marker and whiteboards -- I give the students a set of numbers, which they practice rewriting in ascending order to make the 5-number summary.

In contrast, in Ethnostats, I continue the notes from the two-year-old lesson, which begins by asking more questions about the dot plot and its predictions. We decide that it's most logical to continue writing this in our Stats Scrapbooks, since that's exactly what they're for -- collecting data about the individuals, the class, and the school.

Meanwhile, in Calculus class, today's the day I wanted to show the students the second Calculus video from Michael Starbird, "Stop Sign Crime -- The First Idea of Calculus." It corresponds to Section 2.1 of our text, on tangents and velocity. But unfortunately, I have several problems with technology. It all started last week. My desktop computer has an HDMI connection to the wall -- and it's this connection that allows images from the desktop to be projected onto the screen. But the cable didn't provide much slack -- and last week, simply readjusting my teacher's desk caused the cable to fall out. It didn't simply fall out -- it broke completely.

But, as we all know, there are a declining number of machines that can play DVD's these days. My desktop is the only machine in the classroom that can play the Starbird DVD's. Neither my laptop nor the the newly installed Promethean board (with a CPU attached) can play them. So, here's what I did -- I placed the DVD in my desktop, and then set up a small Zoom meet. Then I turned on the Promethean, entered the same Zoom meet from there, and then played the video. That way, the video appears on the Promethean screen.

What also makes it tricky is that I choose a confusing limit question for the Warm-Up -- and this question takes extra time to explain. Thus by the time, I start the video, I barely have enough time to finish it before the dismissal bell -- and I needed the last few minutes to introduce the students to the DeltaMath website, where tonight's homework assignment is posted. The replacement HDMI cable needs to be ordered, so I wonder whether it will arrive in two weeks, when I want to show the next Starbird video. At the very least, I need to give a very simple Warm-Up on the days I plan on playing these videos.

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