Chapter 8 Test (Days 65-66)

Today is the third Monday in November. You might recall that the third Mondays in August, September, and October were all monthly minimum days, and thus you might wonder whether today is a monthly minimum day as well.

Well, here's your answer -- it isn't. It was supposed to be a minimum day, but it isn't. Instead, the leaders changed the short day to Friday -- the last day school before Thanksgiving. And this affects the block schedule in the same way that previous minimum Fridays did (including the fifth of this month) -- today is no longer an all-classes Monday, but an odd block day along with Wednesday. Tuesday and Thursday once again become even block days.

There is also something else important happening to me this week -- and it has to do with the ongoing teaching problems in Calculus. Even before I received the concern letter, I'd already acknowledged that I'm a new AP teacher who could benefit from observing an experienced Calculus teacher. And so I'd been corresponding with the Calc teacher at the main high school in the district, to see whether I can observe any of his classes.

The block schedule at the flagship high school is different from ours. Because of this, the Calc teacher there told me that the best day to observe his classes would be a Wednesday. Since I no longer have a first period, I could observe his class on a Wednesday when first period meets (at my school) -- this is not our regular schedule, yet we're now in a stretch of three such Wednesdays in the past four weeks. So the plans for me to observe his classes this upcoming Wednesday finally crystallized.

Here's what all of this means for my blogging schedule -- as usual, I post each day that fifth period Stats meets, which means Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Even though Stats class meets on Wednesday, I won't be there -- instead, I'll be at the flagship high school. I post "A Day in the Life" on special days -- and attending a different school with a different block schedule definitely counts as special. I'll blog about what I learn from my fellow Calc teacher in Wednesday's post.

Then Friday, the last post of this week, will also be "A Day in the Life." It's a monthly minimum day, so it counts as my monthly post -- and it's also the special day "last day before Thanksgiving break" (which was one of Tina Cardone's original special days).

With all of this going on, I haven't said much about what happens in class today. Well, I gave both my Calculus and general Stats classes a chapter test -- Chapter 3 for Calc, Chapter 8 for Stats. As usual, I did a review assignment with marker and whiteboard before the tests -- but this is my first such lesson since I realized that the whiteboard desks can be turned 90 degrees, making each one into a "VNPS" -- that is, a vertical non-permanent surface. A complaint was that the VNPS's are too low to the floor.

I believe that the DeltaMath review activity helped to prepare the students for the test -- even though this test is on paper, all the questions come directly from DeltaMath. But since the test is on paper, I don't have instant feedback on how well they fare until I grade it later this week. And it appears that the VNPS review also helps them -- but I don't have time to review all questions on VNPS. The students appear to struggle on some of the questions that I don't review on either DeltaMath or VNPS.

(For example, on DeltaMath I asked the students to find the derivative of a log to a base other than e, and the website shows that most students understand it, so I don't include it in the VNPS review. But then some of them have trouble differentiating an ln function on the test! In theory, the derivative of ln should be easier than log to a general base, but they might not have realized than ln is a logarithm.)

In Stats, I post a ten-question test from the textbook's Online Test Bank onto Illuminate. Of the ten questions, a whopping seven are multiple choice or matching -- and so Illuminate had already graded 70% of their Chapter 8 Tests. So far, the test results follow the usual pattern -- of the four students in the class, the top two guys got all seven of them correct (and this includes one guy who was absent for all of last week). The other two students don't -- the special ed student (with help from his one-on-one aide) scores 4/7, and the other girl earns 3/7.

What will these students do on Wednesday while I'm at the flagship school? The department chair at my school (that is, my partner teacher) assigns Edpuzzle to her classes such days, so I'll do likewise. As for the Advisory class (College and Career Guidance), I plan on having them practice writing resumes -- it's easy to post a resume template onto Google Classroom and ask them to fill it out. Since it's an odd day, my even periods won't meet on Wednesday. Instead, tomorrow they'll start a data collection activity where they give surveys to students around the school.

Of course, these plans depend on there actually being a sub in my classroom on Wednesday. As I've said before on the blog, our district has a sub shortage, and priority goes to elementary schools. While a sub has already signed up to cover my class, all it takes is for some elementary teacher to wake up sick Wednesday morning and suddenly I've lost my sub. If I do lose the sub, I'll be a team player -- as it turns out, I can teach my Advisory, rush out to the flagship and observe two classes (one AB, one BC), and rush back to my own school in time for fifth period. Only my Calculus class would need to be covered during another teacher's conference period (fitting, since the reason for my absence is Calc).

During the observation, I hope to learn more about effective teaching practices. I'll also check to see how far along in the text the experienced teacher's AB class is. Recall that originally, I wanted to give the Chapter 3 Test last week and start Chapter 4 this week -- the test fell back one day to day. I can't start Chapter 4 on the day I'm out, and I can't start it on the minimum day. Thus the one-day delay destroyed any chance of starting Chapter 4 this week, putting me a full week behind.

My partner teacher has already warned me that I might need to give homework (to the Calculus class only) during Thanksgiving break -- and the observation might confirm it, if it shows that I'm far behind the flagship teacher's class. I've never been a fan on giving math homework over long breaks -- to me, it makes more sense to for English teachers to assign vacation HW than math. But my partner teacher tells me that vacation HW is almost expected in AP classes. If I assign any work over the break, it will most likely be Edpuzzle and DeltaMath, to introduce the concepts of Chapter 4.

I'm also wondering whether it's possible for me at least to meet the Stats teacher at the flagship school while I'm there -- especially the Ethnostats teacher. I'd like to ask her more about some of her old assignments that I've been given my own class -- starting with the data collection assignment that we're doing this week.

There's one last thing I want to mention in this post. The principal has asked me to discuss what to do about math classes for second semester. She sends me an email after first period conference -- so I have no time to meet with her during third and fifth periods. Instead, the discussion will be tomorrow during sixth period conference. I'm not sure what there is to discuss, since math classes are yearlong -- but I have a guess. Again I have two prep periods, first and sixth period -- teaching only four math classes when I'm being paid to teach five. So I suspect that the meeting will be about filling one of those periods with a new class. Well, I'll find out for sure tomorrow.

This concludes this post. Tomorrow will be a tweeting day -- and of course, I'll write about the start of the Ethnostats data collection project.