Finals, Fawn, and Phones

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 final. And as promised, the first thing I'll discuss in today's post is the content of those final exams -- and what's happening in the classes for which I wrote those tests.

The Ethnostats Final

This was the harder of the two tests for me to write, by far. Like the first semester final, this test will consist of 30 questions. Here are the chapters of the text from which I drew the questions:

11. 8 questions
12. 3 questions
13. 3 questions
14. 5 questions
15. 8 questions
16. 2 questions
17. 1 question

There's a reason that I draw the bulk of the test from Chapters 11 and 15. Chapter 11, "Observational Studies and Experiments," was the first chapter of the new semester, and we spent three weeks on it. Then Chapters 12-13 occurred during my COVID positive test, and I also took time to cover Ethnic Studies topics and show the movies 13th and Hidden Figures (on February 28th-March 2nd) -- each additional movie day meant one fewer day spent on the text.

But Chapter 15 is perhaps one of the most important chapters in Ethnostats. It is titled "Probability Rules!" and its main topic is on conditional probability and independence. Many Ethnic Studies topics ultimately go back to these notions. For example, in 13th we learn that while one out of every 17 white men has been to prison, one of three black men have been imprisoned. In other words:

P(prison | white man) = 1/17

P(prison | black man) = 1/3

Therefore being imprisoned is decidedly not independent of race. And the goal of many egalitarians is to transform society so that things like being imprisoned become race-independent. Thus I wrote eight questions on Chapter 15, as is befitting such an important chapter. This left me with only two questions for Chapter 16 and one for Chapter 17. Notice that 17 is the first chapter of Part V of the text, "From the Data at Hand to the World at Large." My goal was to make it to Part V, and so it's now enshrined in my final exam that we'll at least cover its first chapter.

Now that I've written the test, I must find time to teach the material it assesses. My original pacing plan allots two weeks to each chapter -- and last week was supposed to be the first week of Chapter 15.

We must also keep in mind that based on my grading percentages, I'm supposed to assign four 75-point quizzes and four 100-point tests -- with projects mostly replacing the 100-point tests in Ethnostats. So far, I've assigned two projects (at the ends of Chapters 12 and 14) and one quiz (Chapter 13), with the second quiz to be assigned next week. This would mark the end of the two-week block that I scheduled for Chapter 15.

But let's see what those two weeks would actually look like:

Monday, March 14th (minimum day): Pi Day activity (Sarah Carter's Pi Ku)
Wednesday, March 16th: Chapter 15 lesson
Friday, March 18th: (Day After) St. Patrick's Day activity (I got this from a local newspaper that happened to have an article on diversity in the states. To make it more fun, I also added a survey on how much on average had been spent in each state on St. Paddy's day the previous night.)

This Week: Spring Break

Next Week: Review for Chapter 15 Quiz, then give the Chapter 15 Quiz

And now you see the problem -- I already used two days last week on activities that, while interesting, aren't directly related to Chapter 15. I only spent one day actually teaching Chapter 15 -- and now I'm supposed to give the quiz next week. Just imagine how well the students will do on such a quiz -- on a chapter that we only really discussed one day, with a weeklong break between that day and the test. And all of this is for supposedly the most important chapter in the text!

So of course I won't do this. Instead, I'll still give the quiz next week, but on Chapter 14, not 15. Even though I took time during 14 to give a Women and Inequality Project (for International Women's Day, March 8th), 14 is a shorter chapter than 15, so it's OK. This means that I can review and assess the previous chapter, and then spending more time on 15, giving it the respect it deserves.

So here is a revised pacing plan for the semester moving forward, with the lessons to be taught and the assessment (75-point quiz or 100-point project) to be given at the end of each two-week block:

Weeks of March 14th, 28th: Chapter 15 lessons (Chapter 14 Quiz)
Weeks of April 4th, 11th: Chapter 15 lessons (third 100-point project)
Weeks of April 18th, 25th: Chapter 16 lessons (Chapter 15 Quiz)
Weeks of May 2nd, 9th: Chapter 17 lessons

At this point, there is one 75-point and one 100-point assignment left to be given. Normally I give a actual quiz for 75 points and and project for 100 points, but just as I did last semester, I'll reverse it at the end of the semester, so that the final exam can be worth 100 points. This means that the last project for 75 points will be a project.

Looking at the pacing guide of my Ethnostats predecessors, I notice that Part IV of the text is supposed to end (after Chapter 16) with a multimedia project. By waiting until after Chapter 17 to do it instead, I can time it so that it's after the AP Calculus exam, so that both Calculus and Ethnostats can do their multimedia projects at the same time.

(The list shows that it's impossible for us to do the Part V project. In theory, each Ethnostats student was supposed to pair up with a freshman student at the start of the school year, to serve as the "older buddy" of that younger student -- and then the final project would be to present what was learned during that companionship. But our school doesn't even have freshmen, and so this never occurred.)

I expect that I'll have to tweak the final exam between now and the date of the test. Some of my Chapter 11 questions I got from the text, but I left my answer key at school. (All I have at home is a student text that gives the answers to only the odds, but I placed some evens on the test.) I'm also considering changing some of the Chapter 12-13 questions to matching to make it a little easier on the students.

The Trig Final

The exam for Trig is a little more straightforward. Here is the chapter distribution:

1. 9 questions
2. 3 questions
3. 7 questions
4. 9 questions
5. 2 questions

Just as with Part V in Ethnostats, I expect to reach only the first section of Chapter 5, and so both Chapter 5 questions come from Section 5.1.

Here the bulk of the questions come from Chapters 1 and 4. Chapter 4 is on the graphs of the various trig functions (including transforming parent graphs). Of course I converted this to multiple choice, but I still have to draw all those graphs on the final exam.

And I'm not sure how to post all of those graphs to Illuminate. (Recall my promise is that the tests must be ready to go -- as in my students can arrive to class on the very first day after spring break and start taking the tests in the first minute of class. It's not that I really want to give them the finals in March -- I just want the tests to be ready as if I were going to do so.) The questions are in a Google Document, but I had to draw the graphs by hand and upload them.

I did post both the questions and the graphs to Illuminate, but I'm not sure whether the students will be able to see both at the point of taking the test -- and I might not know until finals day itself. But in the end, that's OK -- as long as they can see the questions, I can just print out copies of the graphs and hand it to them on finals day (one for each of the four students in second period, and then I visit the Xerox machine before fourth period finals).

Fawn Nguyen: Number Talks for Middle Schoolers

Let me use the rest of this post to discuss a few other topics that are on my mind. We start with Fawn Nguyen -- the Queen of the MTBoS. In her post, she writes about Number Talks -- something I mentioned briefly on the old blog, as a progressive (that is, anti-traditionalist) way to get students to gain number sense:

https://www.fawnnguyen.com/teach/number-talks-for-middle-schoolers

I know -- I'm not a middle school teacher, so I shouldn't be linking to middle school blogs. But then again, I did receive that pink slip two weeks ago, forcing me to look for a new job. As far as I know, I'll be a middle school teacher next year.

Fawn writes:

If I may recommend only one thing to K-12 classrooms, that thing has to be number talks. As a warm-up routine, it usually takes less than 10 minutes, yet it pays dividends in building number sense, connecting computational strategies, honoring flexible thinking.

And notice that she writes "K-12 classrooms," so it's not just for middle school.

Oh, and speaking of Fawn Nguyen, I've been reading her Twitter account as well. Recall that during spring break, I'm supposed to be reading and answering questions I find on Twitter. I want to discuss more about what I see on Fawn's (and other teachers') Twitter, but that will have to wait until my next spring break post. I spent so much time writing finals today that I don't have time to tweet today. And there's other things I wish to get to in today's post.

Phones in the Classroom: From 4 Years Ago

Almost every teacher with a Twitter or blog has mentioned phones in the classroom at some point. The reason, of course, is obvious -- too many of our students are 100%'ers who insist on using phones during 100% of their waking hours. And this is despite rules discouraging their use in the classroom.

Today is the tenth anniversary of one of the toughest days I ever had as a sub -- and the reason it was so tough had to do with phones in the classroom. This was back before I started blogging, so I never wrote about the incident. I wanted to devote today's anniversary to blogging about it and reflecting -- until I found myself spending most of the day writing finals. Indeed, the anniversary was an incentive for me to get on writing those finals so I could be done with them and blog, and I made it -- only to be left with less time for actually blogging about the anniversary.

I will still blog about the incident and about phones in general, but not as much as I'd hoped. For starters, I'll repost part of something I wrote at this time four years ago. It refers to a minor incident (at least compared to 2012), and it starts with another link to a Fawn Nguyen post about phones:

http://fawnnguyen.com/maybe-less-tech-in-math-and-school/

I’m sipping hot sake while waiting for my food. I scan the restaurant, about half full already for an early Friday evening. Two kids are on their smartphones at the table with their parents. They don’t even look up as the waiter arrives to take their orders; I guess the parents already know what to order for them. At the next table, I see a young child sitting in his high chair and watching a video on a propped up smartphone. Nearly every kid in the restaurant is doing something on his/her phone. Never mind the adults.
This scene is all too familiar, too common — so common that it would be “odd” if we didn’t see this. And we’ve been seeing it for some time now.

I’m happy and grateful that technology is here to stay. But I hope we seek opportunities to connect more humanly.

There are several things going on in this post. First of all, Nguyen is a middle school teacher, so of course she's in a room surrounded by kids on phones all day. The problem, of course, is that she's describing a restaurant, not a classroom.

It's easy to relate the restaurant to the classroom here. The students want to use phones in the class, but it's not because the lesson is particularly boring. It's because phones are the only things that entertains these youngsters, as evidenced by their use at the restaurant. In other words, if the kids had their way, they'd spend almost 100% of their waking hours using the phones.

And, most important, they believe that anyone who gets between them and their 100% waking hour phone use is "mean" or "unfair." Of course, this means that the teachers who tell them that they can't use phones in class are "mean." Nguyen's story takes place late Friday afternoon -- and to the kids, it's the start of 60+ hours of no teachers telling them to put their phones away. That's an entire weekend with no teachers between them and their 100% waking hour phone use.

We expect middle school students to be interested in 100% waking hour phone use. It's a shame that at least elementary school teachers can't be protected from children who desire 100% phone use, as Nguyen's statement tells us here:

At the next table, I see a young child sitting in his high chair and watching a video on a propped up smartphone.

I've heard of two-year-olds using phones before -- and sometimes I wonder how this is even possible, since they wouldn't even know what buttons to press, or how to spell words to text. Well, I guess this answers the question -- the parents play videos for them, so the toddlers only watch them.

The problem is that not only do the kids view teachers who take their phones away as "mean," but so their parents who won't buy them the phones. And presumably, any parent who gets anything less than an unlimited plan is also getting in the way between the children and their 100% phone use goal.

I don't write about family that much on the blog. But I have said in old posts that I have no children (for example, in old Daylight Saving Time posts where I mention that I prefer Year-Round DST since I have no kids, whereas parents tend to prefer Year-Round Standard Time). So the question I ask myself is, what would I do about phones if I had children of my own?

In our society there are some items which have a minimum age requirement. For example, we can't legally purchase alcohol or tobacco until age 21 -- the latter a California law. (One issue mentioned in last week's walkout is whether guns should be added to the list.) Of course, youngsters often become interested in alcohol or tobacco well before the age of 21 -- but it's not usually as early as six. Most six-year-olds are interested in drinking chocolate milk and soda pop, not alcohol.

Likewise, I'd want my children to be "too young even to be interested in using cell phones" -- as long as possible. For starters, this means I wouldn't play them videos such as the one Nguyen's toddler watched in the restaurant. That two-year-old didn't beg his parents to buy him a phone -- the parents just showed them the phone. If I were a parent, I wouldn't do that.

Sooner or later though, the inevitable happens. My children would see another student at school with a phone, and then the begging begins. So the next goal is for my children to know that I won't buy them a phone without them thinking I'm mean -- as long as possible.

Here's what I'd want them to know -- the older generations criticize and make fun of younger generations who are addicted to cell phones. Fawn Nguyen is either a late Boomer or an early Gen X'er, and in this very post she's criticizing young people. Avoiding cell phones and finding other ways to entertain yourself, then, is a way of making older people like you.

My own generation -- the late X'er/early Millennial cusp -- is caught in the middle. I remember that as a young child, I often played cheap handheld games, such as baseball and Yahtzee. Most often, these games were kept in the car, and so I played them on long car rides. It never occurred to me that I should spend 100% of my waking hours playing these games, or that anyone who stopped me from playing them 24-7 was mean. I often went days without playing these handheld games -- it never occurred to me that I should bring them to school, much less play them during class. But of course, nowadays parents would entertain their kids on long car rides with phones, not handheld games -- and it's the phones that kids want to use during 100% of their waking hours.

I'd like to tell my children that the kids who use phones 100% of waking hours are future dropouts, and that students who earn A's and B's don't own phones. But this is probably false -- even future valedictorians most likely own cell phones.

But I can make a clearer relationship between math and phones. This is the idea behind the phrase I made my own students say -- "Without math, cell phones wouldn't exist." After all, anyone who wants to work for Google or Apple should have a STEM degree, which requires being good at math.

So here's the idea -- I set some appropriate age for my children to have their first phone -- let's say seventh grade. But this doesn't mean that I buy them their phone as soon as they've completed the sixth grade -- it means I get the phone as soon as they complete sixth grade math. If they are below grade level, then they don't get the phone until they earn a passing grade in the final trimester of Math 6 (or a higher class). If they're above grade level, they can get the phone earlier. If I held myself to this standard, I'd get my phone in second grade -- the year I independently studied Pre-Algebra.

What I really want is to show my children that all the STEM disciplines are relevant to cell phone technology, not just math. So once they get their phones, I'd like to implement the second part of my academic incentive -- the grades the students receive in all STEM classes that appear on the report card (math, science, maybe computers) determine how much money I spend on the phone plan. So if the STEM grades are all A's, then I get an unlimited plan. If the STEM grades are B's then I get some sort of limited plan, all the way down to no plan for D's and F's.

The problem, of course, is that the phone company probably wouldn't like it if I kept on switching between different plans every month. Even if I simplified this a little -- the child gets an unlimited plan and I pay the phone bill if all the STEM grades are C or better, and I skip a month if one of the STEM grades is a D or F -- my credit rating might suffer whenever I skip a payment.

Well, at least I should be able to implement the first part of the plan -- purchase the phone as soon as the student completes sixth grade math -- without any troubles with the phone company.

Returning to Nguyen's post, her main topic is whether schools should embrace technology and find ways to incorporate it into the lessons. She quotes her own tweet:

At BTSA mentor training, 1 of the prompts was "How do u incorporate tech into a lesson?" My knee-jerk response, "You don't." It's back to that tech for tech’s sake that irks me. It's like asking, "How do u add aspirin into your diet?" @ddmeyer

In many ways, the technology debate mirrors the traditionalist/progressive debate. Progressive reformers tell us that students who have a 100% phone use mindset might complete an assignment if it's online, whereas they won't even answer Question #1 on a p-set in a printed textbook. Indeed, last year at my old school, the history teacher painstakingly scanned every page of the text and posted it online for exactly this reason.

But notice that Nguyen is actually on the traditionalist side of the technology debate. She doesn't believe that technology should be incorporated into a lesson for the sake of including it.

Phones in the Classroom: From 10 Years Ago

So what exactly happened one decade ago today?

Well, so long has passed that I don't remember all of it. But here's the gist of it -- I was subbing in a sixth grade math and science class. A group of boys asked me whether they could use their cell phones in class. I knew that if I'd said "no," I'd have to confiscate their phones if they took them out again -- and they'd never surrender their phones to a sub. So I said "yes."

But it wasn't just that they were playing with phones in class -- it was what they were doing on them. I recall they were talking loudly, taking photos of each other around the classroom, and being disruptive to the whole class. One girl became upset with she did something wrong (not related to phones) and I left her name for the teacher, while all along the other boys were playing around on their phones.

When the regular teacher found out what had happened, the boys got in trouble. But since I'd told them "yes" when they asked to use their phones, the teacher informed me that I would never be allowed to sub for her again. 

That year, 2012, was probably the year when cell phone use became pervasive. The first iPhone was invented in 2007, but it took those five years before their use in the classroom became a problem.

There's one thing that I've seen in my classrooms so far about phone use, and I haven't seen other teachers mention it on Twitter or Blogger. I mentioned it briefly on my blog four years ago:

I wrote about one girl -- the special scholar -- who also loses her phone (in September 2016). It's difficult to know what a teacher should do in this case. The student desperately wants the phone, knowing how angry the parents will be if they discover its missing. But the teacher doesn't want to waste class time on something the students shouldn't have anyway. I consider calling the office (cf. the January 6th, 2018 post) but I ultimately don't. (Some schools have it built directly into the rules -- no class time can be spent searching for phones, no matter how expensive they are.)

Actually, this girl from the old charter school was granted an exception to the no cell phone rule from our English teacher, because she had trouble reading what was on the board.

As it turns out, this was a sign of things to come. Many students who sit in the back rows of my classroom have trouble reading what I write or project on the front board. And it's easy to see why phones would be the reason for this -- whereas previous generations have had no problems reading from a board 12 feet away, the younger generations are so used to reading from a phone 12 inches in front of their faces that they can't read something that's 12 feet away.

This is something I must keep in mind as I try to devise a phone policy for my own classes. The rules usually state that phones shouldn't be used in class unless they are for academic purposes. But technically, a student in the back who can't read the back board, and thus must take a picture of the board with a phone in order to read it from the picture, really is using the phone academically!

Right now, the only time I forbid phones is when the students need to pay attention to the front board and it's something that they don't necessarily need to read carefully. This includes certain key moments during movies in Ethnostats, as well as social emotional learning lessons in Advisory. Oh, and speaking of emotional learning: 

Cheng's Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Chapter 15

We still have two chapters in Eugenia Cheng's third book that I promised to write during spring break, so let me do so now. (By the way, I returned Cheng's children's book, "Baking Infinite Pie with x + y," back to the library today.)

Chapter 15 of Eugenia Cheng’s The Art of Logic in an Illogical World is called “Emotions.” Here’s how it begins:



“Emotions do not lie. They are never false. If you feel something you are definitely feeling it. If someone tells you that you are not justified in feeling it, that doesn’t help.”



Human beings are emotional creatures – there’s no getting around it. In this chapter, Cheng shows us that it’s impossible to be completely logical – and how we can deal with it. She writes:



“Sometimes people try to argue that we should only use logic and scientific evidence to reach conclusions. However, if we then meet someone who isn’t convinced by logic and evidence, how are we going to persuade them to be convinced by it?”



Therefore, Cheng concludes, emotions are more powerful than logic. This doesn’t mean that we must choose to be either emotional or logical. In fact, this is yet another false dichotomy:



A: Using emotions

B: Using logic.



And in fact, Cheng draws yet another chart which illustrates the needless antagonism between intelligence and sympathy:



UL: using emotions

UR: being unfeeling

LL: being illogical, thus stupid

LR: using logic



There are false equivalences on the left and right, true dichotomies on the top and bottom, no disagreement between UL and LR, and needless antagonism between LL and UR.



Additionally, Cheng draws a Venn diagram. Here “logical” and “emotional” are interlocking circles inside of a universe, allowing us to be neither or both logical and emotional.



Cheng admits that there are times when it’s good to be completely emotional:



“This might be when enjoying sensory experiences, allowing ourselves to be open to art, or just when supporting another person through a difficult or a particularly joyful time.”



The only region of the Venn diagram for which Cheng sees no use for is the outside, when we are neither logical nor emotional.



The author compares being logical to being able to make long term plans, or make short-term goals for long-term gains (often referred to as “future time orientation”). She explains:



“At least, this is one of my personal axioms; at the other extreme, there are some people who strongly believe in only living in the moment, or living entirely emotionally.”



Some catchy slogans tend to override logic. Cheng’s examples include “weight is just a number” and “age is just a number.” But as she points out, medical risks go up with weight and age:



“You might as well say ‘Medical risk is just a number.’ Or even when you’re running a dangerous fever, ‘temperature is just a number.’”



The author tells us that emotions can be persuasive, especially when dealing with language. For example, she disagrees with Shakespeare when he tells us that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet:



“Would you be able to sniff a rose seriously if it was suddenly renamed ‘diarrhea’? It might take some mental effort.”



And she repeats a contentious example from earlier in the book:



“If someone supports ACA but not Obamacare it is painfully clear that they are not evaluating things by their merits but by their names.”



I can’t help but think of another author, JK Rowling, who said it best: “Fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself.”

Again, I remind you that Cheng writes about race and politics throughout her book. If you prefer not to read this, then I suggest that you avoid this blog for the next week and skip all posts that have the "Eugenia Cheng" label.

(Cheng also repeats the example of how men are more willing to admit to forced intercourse than to rape, even though these are the same. I don’t know whether this has anything to do with the current hearings in DC.)



Cheng continues:



“Some people accuse others of conflating feelings with facts, especially if they seem to be convinced by something other than logic and evidence.”


And now the author makes a suggestion:



“Instead of denigrating emotions in a quest for more rigorous discourse, we should acknowledge their truth and seek to find the sense in which there is logic to them.”



Cheng tells us that feelings aren’t facts –  just because we feel something is true, that doesn’t make it true. But then again, it’s true that we really do have those feelings. In that sense, then, feelings are indeed facts.



Feelings, for example, shape our opinions on climate change:



“Those who do not believe the evidence are typically not afraid of climate change and so don’t do anything about it.”



A few chapters back, Cheng discusses analogies. Now the author informs us that analogies can be used to get others to feel differently about a subject:



“The power of the analogy is in doing this via emotions, without having to appeal to anyone’s understanding of the logic involved. Unless you are talking to someone already proficient in abstraction and logic, this might be the best you can do.”



Cheng now draws another chart. In this chart, “logical example” and “emotional example” are linked together by “powerful analogy.”



And her next powerful analogy is all about power – in relationships, that is:



“Some people argue that this means men making rude jokes about women is worse than women making rude jokes about men. Or to push it to a greater extreme, that men sexually harassing women is worse than women sexually harassing men.”



Cheng draws a chart to illustrate this. “Men mistreating women” is linked by “privileged people mistreating oppressed people,” which in turn is linked, along with “women mistreating men,” to “people mistreating people.”

Now she moves on to another example:

"There is a definite problem with power differences here, which is why even if an interaction appears to be consensual, it is illegal between a teacher and a pupil in some countries, just as between an adult and a minor."

Cheng draws another chart to illustrate this. “A teacher asking a pupil for sex” is linked by “a person in power asking someone in their power for sex,” which in turn is linked, along with “a pupil asking a teacher for sex,” to “a person asking a person for sex.”



She continues by making an analogy with how power differences lead to structural racism.



The author recommends that we should uncover another person’s fundamental axioms and basic beliefs:



“Our analysis does not tell us how to do that, but at least if we have reached an understanding of why someone really feels something, we are in a better position than if we just think they are stupid.”



Therefore, Cheng ends the chapter with review and preview:



“I believe it is therefore incumbent on more logical people to invoke emotional means to make sure logical thoughts are conveyed. This is the subject of the closing chapter of the book.”

And we'll get to that closing chapter in my next post

Conclusion

OK, so there are still things I wish to discuss, but I didn't have time today. In particular, I'm aware that the Senate passed a Year-Round DST bill on the day after my previous post. That's definitely worth writing about.

Fortunately, I do plan on writing one more spring break post. Many of the topics that I didn't get to (or only briefly mentioned) today will appear in that post.

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