Chapter 6: What's Normal? Continued (Day 42)

Today is Columbus Day, or Indigenous Peoples' Day. While California schools don't close for the holiday, some districts hold a PD day today. My district, of course, had our PD day a week ago.

Today in Stats, we cover the next three pages in Chapter 6, on Normal distributions. Here the students learn about finding the area between two z-scores. On the TI-83, this is the invNorm function. As for the TI-84, invNorm is just like the normalpdf and normalcdf functions -- mu and sigma are entered. This lesson goes more smoothly this time, since by now I'm expecting the TI-84 version of invNorm to be beefed-up from the TI-83 version.

The exception, though, is in fourth period Ethnostats. For most of Chapter 6, the lessons for general Stats and Ethnostats are nearly identical. But since fourth period is larger than either second or fifth periods, everything goes more slowly. This includes the Warm-Up -- I must keep telling the students to be quiet while I read about the Hispanic Heritage Month mathematician of the day, and then it takes extra time for some students to finish writing the bio summary on the Warm-Up page. Moreover, in second and fifth periods, I start going over the homework -- handing out calculators when they reach the normalcdf questions, and then letting use these calculators to learn about invNorm. And so it serves as going over the previous HW and new material at the same time. But by the time I finally reach the normalcdf questions in fourth period, there's not enough time to do invNorm fully, and so I have another rushed lesson. Luckily, Chapter 6 is more or less over. And so tomorrow and Wednesday become review days -- I've already announced that there'll be quizzes in all classes at the end of this week. This includes Ethnostats, where two years ago, the teacher gave a quiz on statistics terminology and data representation in mid-October.

This means that there's a quiz coming up in Calculus as well. I've divided the current Chapter 3, which has nine sections, into three parts, and so this quiz should naturally cover Sections 3.1-3.3. The problem is that Section 3.3 is on derivatives trig functions, but many of the trig derivatives I've seen so far on DeltaMath also require the Chain Rule, which doesn't appear until Section 3.4. So if I can't find any trig derivatives that don't require Chain (such as x + sin x, or x sin x, instead of sin 2x), then I'll end up including only Sections 3.1-3.2 on the quiz.

Of the six students in my Calculus class, three are absent. Luckily, I'd already planned it to be a Michael Starbird day, showing his Lecture 6: "Abstracting the Derivative -- Circles, Squares, and Belts." Since this lecture isn't as important as some of the others, I take turns with each of the three students, working with them one-on-one to reteach Product and Quotient Rules after last Thursday's rushed lesson. And it appears that this trio at least now understands Product and Quotient. Then again, these three are probably the top three students in the class -- I'm still worried how the absent trio will fare. Then again, if I can't include Section 3.3 on the DeltaMath quiz, then I can squeeze in more 3.2 with these three and then reinforce 3.3 next week, after the quiz.

Meanwhile, I've finally been granted access to AP Classroom. Now I can use this website for more resources as well -- maybe there are some good non-Chain trig questions there.