Chapter 7: A Tale of Two Variables, Continued (Days 52-53)

There are several irregularities with the schedule the next two weeks. That's because this district has fall Parent Conferences for high school. First of all, Parent Conference Day, on Thursday, is itself a minimum day, so that we can begin calling D and F students at 1:30. In order to keep the block schedule balanced, we have odd periods meeting today and Wednesday, and even periods tomorrow and Friday.

But then, like with Back to School Night two months ago (and just like many other districts, including LAUSD and my Orange County district last year), there's another minimum day coming (the type where teachers, not just students, get to leave at noon to make up for the late night of conferences). In order to separate the two minimum days, the other early day will be a week from Friday. This in turn affects the block schedule for next week -- Monday and Wednesday are odd periods, Tuesday and Thursday are even.

How does all of this affect my blogging schedule, you might ask? Well, the rule of thumb is that I blog on whatever days fifth period meets. For this week, I post today, Wednesday, and Thursday, and for next week, I'll blog Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. 

But forget about next week -- this week's schedule is stranger. Notice what affect the all-classes minimum day has on the schedule -- for odd periods, the short day is the last meeting of the week, but for even periods, the short day is between the two block days. This is awkward, especially since I'd always planned on giving the third quiz this week, on the last day of the week that each respective class meets. It would mean that I'd give the quiz to odd periods on the minimum day and to even periods on a block day -- that is, I'd have to make the quiz shorter for the odd periods.

So what are my plans for this weird week? Fortunately, I don't have two sections of the same prep with one odd and one even, and so I can justify switching out the activities for my classes. All classes will take the quiz on Thursday, the minimum day. For fifth period Stats, today I finish Chapter 7, on bivariate data and scatterplots, and assign the students a certain scatterplot to draw. Wednesday will be the review day -- I'll assign the even questions at the end of the chapter that day.

Since Calculus meets third period, it follows a pattern similar to general Stats. Today I teach Section 3.6, on inverse trig functions and their derivatives. Once again, Wednesday will be the review day, with all assignments on DeltaMath. With only one day between the review day and the actual quiz in both classes, plenty of time will be given for students to complete the even problems from the text or DeltaMath.

Ethnostats, which I teach even periods, will follow a different pattern. Tomorrow we'll finish Whodunnit, and then go directly to a study guide for review. There's no time for marker-and-whiteboard review before the quiz on the short day -- instead, doing the study guide on paper/computer is a required assignment. On Friday (since by then the quiz is complete), I plan on doing two activities from the old Ethnostats class from two years ago.

I'll tweet more about that Whodunnit activity tomorrow. My next blogging day will be Wednesday.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Advisory in Review (Day 180)

Today is "A Day in the Life" for the special day "last day of school." It is the last day of final exams for juniors, with Periods 4-6 meeting today. But before we begin "A Day in the Life," I have much to say about today's schedule. First of all, recall that there are only two minimum days for finals this week instead of three -- one last effect of losing two January school days. (Something similar happened when I was a student teacher -- the school was short minutes and couldn't have three minimum days for finals. Instead, on the first day we have Period 1-2 finals for two hours each as usual, then it was Period 3-4 for 30 minutes each. The second day was similar, with Period 3-4 finals and short Periods 5-6. Only the last day was a true minimum day.) The juniors take their finals today, but not my Ethnostats juniors. Since seniors are a supermajority in my class, I already gave my juniors their tests on senior finals day. You may ask, what are t...
Read more

Chapter 15: Probability Rules! (Days 140-141)

Today in Ethnostats, we work in Chapter 15, on rules of probability. The students learn an addition rule where the events need not be disjoint, and a multiplication rule where the events need not be independent. In my last post, I wrote that I would give a 12-point assignment today. I end up assigning the questions at the end of the chapter, even though the Chapter 15 quiz is several weeks away. The students must answer the first 12 questions on that page -- in other words, it's a dozen questions for a dozen points. One of these questions asks about probability using playing cards. I've been meaning to give the students a playing card worksheet, and so I finally do this today. The students glue this into page 28 of their Stats Scrapbooks -- and as it turns out, the 12-point assignment happens to be Assignment #28. So the next few interactive notebook pages and assignment numbers will line up. Meanwhile, in Calculus yesterday, we moved on to Section 6.5, on average value of a fu...
Read more

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 Her...
Read more