Chapter 5: Stories Quantitative Data Tell, Continued (Days 31-32)

Yesterday was the fall equinox -- it occurred at 12:21 PM Pacific time. As I mentioned on the old blog, I want to choose an extra pencil giveaway between the first day of school and Halloween -- and that I should select either Back to School Night or the fall equinox. Since Back to School night was a bit too early in this district, I decided to make the equinox my giveaway day instead. 

The true equinox moment -- 12:21 -- was during fourth period Ethnostats. I gave pencils to most of the students -- one guy was summoned to the office and left before 12:21, so he never got a pencil.

Today in Stats, we continue with the next six pages in Chapter 5, "Stories Quantitative Data Tell." These pages show how to graph boxplots on the TI calculator, introduce timeplots, and discuss how measures of center and spread are affected if each data point is raised or lowered by a constant.

All of this occurs in fifth period, of course. This is the first general Stats class since the collapse of my first period, with the lone guy in that class switching to fifth. I hope he enjoys being able to work with the other students in that class.

Both classes today, Calculus and Stats, involving students retaking last week's quiz. The one girl who was absent last week (hence the original reason for allowing retakes) earned a B on her quiz. Most of the other students who redo the quiz improve by about one letter grade today. The guy who earned the lowest score last week -- 21/75 -- improves to 34/75 today, but it's still only a 45%.

Then in Stats, my one special ed student requested a retake as well. With the assistance of his one-on-one aide and his notes, he improved from 37/75 to 48/75, which is a D.

With five out of six Calc students doing a retake, I do try to compress today's lesson -- Section 2.7, "The Derivative as a Function." I seamlessly move from last night's homework question on graphing to today's lesson on the graph of a function and its derivative -- and I also come up with my own example not in the text in order to gauge student learning. 

Then I move on to more difficult examples involving the using the limit definition of the derivative to differentiate radical and rational functions. Still, I had to squeeze in nondifferentiable functions after the quiz retake. So there's still room for improvement with efficiency.

In Stats class, only one student is retaking the quiz, and so I continue with the lesson as regularly scheduled today. The one guy who redoes the quiz today is able to practice on the TI calculator and take a few notes before he begins the assessment.

My plans for Ethnostats tomorrow is to begin the final draft of the Global Climate change posters, but this will be only if enough students have finished the rough draft. Otherwise, I might rearrange it so that a traditional lesson occurs tomorrow, saving the posters for Monday instead.

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