Chapter 7: A Tale of Two Variables (Day 47)

I'll begin with a description of today, in "A Day in the Life" format. This is my monthly posting day -- my school has a minimum day on one Monday per month. By the way, the dates of these monthly minimum days aren't announced in advance (so it isn't something simple like "the third Monday of each month," even though today is indeed the third Monday of October).

8:00 -- The school day begins -- but my day doesn't. My original first period class had just one student, and so shortly after the September minimum day, he was moved to my fifth period. And so I no longer have a first period class.

8:15 -- Here in California, Governor Newsom has recently announced a vaccine mandate -- all students eligible for the vaccine will soon be required to take it before stepping onto a K-12 campus. But not everyone agrees with the mandate -- so a statewide walkout/protest is scheduled for this time today. Of course walks out of my first period class -- because I don't have a first period class. I stay in my room -- all teachers are forbidden from participating in political activities during paid time.

8:40 -- Second period arrives. This is the first of two Ethnostats classes.

I begin the class with a Warm-Up, based on the question that most students got wrong on the quiz we took last Friday. They were asked to use the 68-95-99.7 rule to estimate the percentage of the population that has IQ scores between 100 and 130 (assuming a mean of 100 and a SD of 15). Common errors include forgetting to take half of 95 (thus really giving the percentage in the 70-130 range) and taking half of 68 instead of 95 (thus really giving the percentage in the 100-115 range).

For the main lesson, I start with pages 138-140 of the text. These are the first three pages of Chapter 7, called "A Tale of Two Variables." This is our introduction to bivariate data -- scatterplots. As there are plenty of notes to take of these pages, the lesson is a bit rushed. (A major theme of my posts on minimum days is time management due to the shorter days.)

And for the Exit Pass, I give a simple question on identifying the outlier on a scatterplot.

9:20 -- Second period leaves and third period arrives. This is the AP Calculus class.

The Warm-Up for this class is another question from last Thursday's quiz -- this is on finding the equation of a tangent line, from DeltaMath.

I don't really want to start Section 3.4 -- the Chain Rule, an important lesson -- on this minimum day. So instead, I pass out markers, and we do quiz missed test questions on whiteboards. For another tough DeltaMath question, students are given a function and a slope and must find the points (x, y) such that the tangent line through those points have the given slope.

I have more time management problems in this class -- and it's all due to the Exit Pass. Since I no longer have a first period class, I often use first period to set up the lessons for the rest of the day. but it often takes longer than I plan on, just because of the Exit Pass. I've told my students that I'm following the Rapoport rule where the answer is always the date -- but it's often more difficult to force the answer to be the date than one might think.

For example, after tomorrow's Chain Rule lesson, I could give an Exit Pass problem such as "find f '(0) for the function f(x) = sin(19x)" (or e^(19x)). But that 19 in the problem is a huge giveaway that the answer is 19 (for tomorrow's date, the nineteenth). Then again, I often admit that when the date is prime, it's difficult to find a problem whose answer is that date. For derivative problems, I can always add a + x (or - x) term to force the answer to be the prime date. But one would think that on a date like the eighteenth, it would be easier to find a simple problem whose answer naturally is 18.

At first I thought of "find f '(3) when f(x) = x^3" -- until I remembered that the derivative of x^3 is really 3x^2 and not 2x^2. Of course, I could always make it (2/3)x^3, but I thought that a simpler question with 18 as the answer was just around the corner -- but it wasn't. Indeed, I even clicked on DeltaMath at least 18 times to find a problem whose answer is 18, but none showed up. (If I'm not mistaken, 14, 16, 20, and 22, or their negatives, all came up as answers, but not 18.)

In the end, the Exit Pass becomes "find the slope of the tangent to f (x) = x^2 at x = 9" -- and after wasting all of that time, I forget to set up a homework assignment and end up not posting it to Google Classroom until after the students leave. (Normally I project the HW right under the Exit Pass.) What I need to do is start coming up with Exit Passes the night before class, even if I write the rest of the lesson during prep period. (Are there any good Chain Rule questions with an answer of 19?)

In other news, the one girl who missed class last Thursday says that she plans on taking the quiz after school this Wednesday. This leaves the door open to do quiz corrections on Thursday -- something I haven't done in this class yet. As for AP Classroom, it appears I must wait until the College Board approves my syllabus, which might not be for 60 days (that is, the last day before winter break).

10:00 -- Third period leaves and fourth period arrives. This is the second of two Ethnostats classes.

This class goes just like fourth period, except that I save a little time on the notes. Instead of writing out full descriptions (which they can always read in the text anyway), I have the students just copy pictures of the various scatterplots (negative/positive direction, linear/non-linear, strong/weak pattern).

One guy in this class is on the Cross Country team -- in fact, he's the only runner on the team at our very small school. Over the weekend, I actually watched him run in the Bell Gardens Invitational (held neither at the high school of that name, nor even in the city of that name, but at El Dorado Park). His time was around 21:45 -- an improvement from his last race, but not fast enough to win a medal. He tells me that he hopes to run one more race before the season ends.

Two students in this class were absent on Friday. Like my Calculus student, both of these girls also plan on making up the quiz on Wednesday -- and this time, there may be some quiz retakes joining them.

10:40 -- Fourth period leaves and fifth period arrives. This is the general Stats class.

I teach the same lesson to fifth period as I did the other classes, except that I begin with a Warm-Up based on their own quiz -- what percentage of people have a temperature at least one degree above the mean (assuming a mean of 98.7 degrees and a SD of 0.7 degree). As an example, I also show them a scatterplot of quiz scores vs. days absent in October for my Calculus students. (Two girls with no absences each score 100%, one girl with two absences scores 69%, and the two guys with one absence score in between. The sixth and final student is the one making up her quiz on Wednesday.) This is an example of a negative direction.

By the way, what distinguishes Ethnostats from general Stats is that the former often has special projects that relate Stats to the students' personal lives (often, though not always, including the students' ethnic backgrounds). As I look at the pacing guide of the teacher who taught this course two years ago, an upcoming project for Unit 2 -- the unit that includes Chapters 7-9 -- is a "Whodunnit" where students use scatterplots connecting height and weight to predict the identity of the culprit.

Speaking of which, in these monthly posts I often write about what songs I'd be performing in class if only it hadn't been for the parent complaint I received at the start of the year. Recall from the old blog that I wrote my own "Whodunnit" song that would go along with the project.

11:20 -- Fifth period leaves. Sixth period is my original conference period, and thus my teaching day ends here.

1:15 -- The monthly after-school teachers' meeting begins. A hodgepodge of topics are covered during this meeting:

• The school wants to restore a PBIS system for discipline. We teachers are supposed to distinguish between major and minor infractions and come up with our personal system for our classrooms based on the acronym HONOR. I might fit my ten classroom rules into the HONOR framework.
• The anti-vaccine protest at 8:15 turned out to be a whole bunch of nothing. Not that many students participated in it. Of course, in some places (such as Orange County, where I completed my long-term assignment last year) it's a different story.
• Here in California, the third Thursday in October is always an earthquake drill. We learn more about where we are supposed to go during the Great California Shakeout -- and that's especially helpful for new teachers like me.
• Parent Conferences are coming up next week. We discuss how we can best reach our students who are earning D's and F's in our classes. Just as with Back-to-School Night, I wouldn't be surprised is there is funny business with the block schedule (and hence my blogging schedule).
• There are many problems with absences and especially tardies lately. I assume that this is the case at most schools. While tardies to morning Advisory are almost expected, there are also problems with students late to other classes (due to, say, using restrooms on the other side of campus).

3:30 -- The meeting ends, thus completing my day.

I like to follow up "A Day in the Life" with reflection. This time I have plenty to reflect upon -- let's begin with the Cross Country race that I attended on Saturday. There are three reasons that I wanted to be there to support our lone distance runner:

• He is in my Ethnostats class.
• He is participating in my sport. I was a XC runner as a young high school student.
• I still feel guilty about the Taste of Soul incident from five years ago.

Five years ago to the day, I briefly wrote on my old blog about an incident that took place at my old charter middle school. At the time, I didn't want to mention all the details. But now, five years later, that school has been shut down, and the eighth graders involved have graduated from high school. So I see no harm in revisiting the incident now.

Anyway, it all started with the Taste of Soul, an annual weekend event that takes place in LA. As its name implies, participants at the event partake in various types of soul food. Our charter school used the event to set up a booth there, to recruit prospective parents to send their kids to our school.

The director (principal) asked teachers to participate -- sit at the booth for an hour or two. While I chose not to do so, some other teachers did -- including the middle school English teacher. Unfortunately, while she was there, a group of our eighth grade girls started making fun of her. The English teacher must have criticized or threatened to punish these students.

Then when we returned to school the following week, the girls decided to get back at the teacher by writing a smear letter about all the bad things the teacher (supposedly) did in class to them, and planned on giving the letter to the director. The only part I had in the incident was that the group chose to write the letter during my class time.

To the day, I wonder what would have happened if I had decided to go to Taste of Soul that day. Maybe both the English teacher and I would have been there together -- and maybe the two of us would have been able to stand up to the bullying girls. At any rate, it would have shown to everyone -- the students, my colleague, and the director -- that I was a team player. And so, after I left the old charter, I told myself that the next time I was a teacher, and a principal suggested that I attend some weekend event, I would go there to show that I'm now a team player.

And that's exactly what happened last week. The principal sent emails about the XC race, recruiting us to support our lone runner. And so I finally attended an event to support our school and students. He's in my class, he's doing my sport -- and ironically it's the third Saturday in October, the exact same weekend as the Taste of Soul. (This year's Taste is a drive-thru event due to the pandemic -- there likely are no booths, at least no booths for charter schools.)

And so the one guy who ran did have a small group of us as supporters. In addition to me, our principal and her young son were there. The PE teacher who served as the coach was there, although he had to leave due to a previous engagement that he simply couldn't reschedule. Another girl (our runner's girlfriend?) was also there. She didn't run in the race -- not because the three-mile distance is too long for her, but because it's too short for her. She told me that she's entered in the Malibu half-marathon next month.

The guy who did run also informed me that before the pandemic, our school had several other runners on the XC team. Some of those former teammates are in my other classes. He told me that their quitting the team was definitely due to the disruption caused by the pandemic -- and indeed, he himself ran much faster times before the onset of COVID-19.

I also told him the story of my own days as a young Cross Country runner. I've run in the Bell Gardens Invitational once, as a freshman (before I moved to another district that November). It's the only race in which I ever medaled, due to the meet awarding so many medals. This year, there were 75 medals in each race, but the 75th senior boy crossed the line about three minutes before our runner did.

That day in 1995, it was hot -- and the freshmen races were last, during the warmest part of the day. I received my medal, and then I was about to drink some water. But then the freshman girls race ended -- and one of my teammates looked as if she was about to faint. So I ended up giving her my water. (To this day, this is probably the most chivalrous thing I ever did.) It was hot again this year -- my runner should be glad that he's a senior, with his race early in the morning. I'd promised him that I'd get him a large water bottle if he ran today -- and I did.

I've said to my students that I can never truly know what it's like to be a young person attending school during a pandemic. I was lucky that no pandemic occurred until I was fully an adult. That's why on the old blog, I've written some so-called What If? stories -- what if there was a pandemic that took place during my own childhood or adolescence? I want to return to those stories -- and I will write about them on this new blog, eventually.

For example, what if there had been a pandemic during my senior year -- would I have participated in any sort of anti-vaccine walkout (like the one that occurs today)? That's a hard one -- I'd like to believe that I would have been vaccinated myself. But it might have been tough if I were the only student remaining in class while everyone else was walking out. (Once again, think about young people at that age -- it's difficult to do one thing while the others are doing something else.)

I'll end this post right here. Tomorrow's a busy day with lessons in Calculus and Stats, and I'd better get to working on them -- or at least the Exit Passes.