Stats, Common Core Style

Today in Stats, we take the Chapter 14 Quiz on Illuminate. But there's one question that I don't like based on how it confuses students during the pre-quiz VNPS review session in second period: A multiple-choice quiz has five questions and four answer choices per question. What is the probability of getting all five questions right by pure guessing? The answer, of course, is (1/4)^5. But if entered on a calculator, the answer is 9.765625E-4. Our TI calculators switch to E-notation as soon as the answer is less than 0.001 = 1/1000, which this answer just  barely  is (1/1024). I'm afraid that this E-notation might confuse students. I consider going onto Illuminate and changing the question right then and there, but I don't have time In fourth period. Instead of asking about a five-question quiz, I change it to just four questions.  At any rate, I'm glad I did the VNPS before the quiz -- it helped the students  and  me. Speaking of VNPS, Fawn Nguyen wrote yest...

Today in Ethnostats, we performed two tasks. The first is in the Stats Scrapbooks. On page 26, was Sarah Carter's "Pi Ku" poetry, and so it's about time for us to do something on page 27 today. The activity on page 27 honors Cesar Chavez, a labor leader, so we analyzed the Statistics of unions: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf Chavez might be disappointed to see that Hispanic/Latino workers are less likely to be members of a labor union than white Americans -- that is, P(union|Hispanic/Latino) < P(union). We notice that blacks are the only race with more women than men in the workforce (see  13th ). But blacks are the most unionized race. And since 2020 the number of workers increased, yet unionized workers decreased. The second task is to prepare for the Chapter 14 Quiz coming up on Thursday. Now that I know what the final looks like, I can better manage class time so that the review assignment prepares the students adequately for the quiz, while t...

  Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. Scott Yates and t he 110-95-80 Plan 3. The Author of the Lunisolar Modified Gregorian Calendar 4. Year-Round DST and School Start Times 5. But What About Circadian Rhythms? 6. What If? COVID-91 and COVID-93 7. What If? COVID-96 8. My Plans for April 9.  Cheng's  Art of Logic in an Illogical World , Chapter 16 10. Conclusion Introduction This is my second and final spring break post. In this post, I plan on catching up with a few topics that I don't have time to discuss during teaching time, but only now during vacation time. And we begin with my biannual Daylight Saving Time post. I know, this post is late since it's been two weeks since we set the clocks forward. But this post is timed perfectly for Europe, where clocks will be set forward to Summer Time tonight. But the focus in this post isn't on Europe, but on the US, where the Senate has just passed a bill allowing for Year-Round Summer Time in 2023. As I've mentioned in t...

Table of Contents 1. Introduction 2. The Ethnostats Final 3. The Trig Final 4. Fawn Nguyen: Number Talks for Middle Schoolers 5. Phones in the Classroom: From 4 Years Ago 6. Phones in the Classroom: From 10 Years Ago 7. Cheng's Art of Logic in an Illogical World , Chapter 15 8. Conclusion Introduction This is my first spring break post, which means I did it -- I've finally  finished writing those final exams that I promised to write. And at least I finished them before the last day of the break. Then again, I only had to write two exams -- Ethnostats and Trig. I heard back from the AP Calculus teacher at the main high school, and he tells me that he doesn't assign finals to his AP class either. Instead, he will assign some sort of multimedia project after the AP exam. And so it makes sense for me to do the same with my own Calculus students. And so that left me with only two tests to write. I wrote the Trig final yesterday, and most of today I spend creating the Ethnostats ...