Chapter 15: Probability Rules! Continued (Days 142-143)

This week is a project in my Ethnostats classes. It's definitely not the final video project, which I'm now saving for after Chapter 16 in May. So what project is it? As usual, I check the calendar and what projects my predecessors did at this time of year. In baseball, coming up this week is Jackie Robinson Day. (As I wrote on the old blog, I usually watch the 42 movie each year on April 15th.) Jackie Robinson Day is a great day for Ethnostats, with the usual annual commentary on the decline of blacks in baseball. On the official syllabus, I find a link to an article by Marilyn Elias on the school-to-prison pipeline:

https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/spring-2013/the-school-to-prison-pipeline

Believe it or not, there's a way to tie this two topics into a single package. The link is another article on the official syllabus -- an LA Times article by Sandy Banks about black students and suspensions:

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-01-me-race1-story.html

It's easy to see how the Banks article is related to the school-to-prison pipeline. As for the tie-in to Jackie Robinson, notice that the Banks article takes place as Muir High School in Pasadena. Take one guess as to what high school the black pioneer ballplayer graduated from. And so here's how the project works -- we begin by gluing pages into the Stats Scrapbook. One page is on Jackie Robinson, and the other is on the school-to-prison pipeline. For the Robinson page, the students look up the percentage of black Americans in baseball each year according to the SABR website:

https://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/baseball-demographics-1947-2016/

They compare this to the percentage of black Americans according to the Census. We learn that "baseball player" and "black American" were disjoint in 1940. Blacks were underrepresented in the 1950's, and then the two events became independent a little after 1960. Then African-Americans were overrepresented in baseball for the rest of the century. Independence occurred around 2001 or 2002, and ever since blacks have been underrepresented ever since. The project will continue on Thursday, as the students reach the pipeline portion of the project with a Think-Pair-Share on the two articles.

Meanwhile, in Calculus we looked at accumulation functions -- a topic that isn't discussed much in the text, but appears on AP Classroom (and hence on the AP exam itself). In Trig, we completed the last section of Chapter 3 on angular and linear velocity. Both classes prepared for tomorrow's chapter tests.

Today is Tenday on the Eleven Calendar:

Resolution #10: We treat others the way we want to be treated.

In Advisory we have another SEL lesson which fits this resolution. And in both Ethnostats classes, some students help their classmates catch up in their interactive notebooks.

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