Group Video Project (Day 163)

Today may be Friday the thirteenth, but my bad luck day was yesterday, Thursday the twelfth. That was the day when I was notified that my pink slip had become official. In other words, it was possible that a spot might open up if a couple of math teachers decided to retire, but that never happened. And so I'm now officially unemployed.

And as I mentioned in previous posts, there's absolutely nothing I could have done this year to have changed the outcome -- the decision was completely determined by numbers, seniority, and tenure. If there's anything I could have changed, it was in past years -- find a way to have gotten a job earlier so that I'd have enough seniority to avoid the cuts. I'll be making more comments about this in future posts -- specifically what this means for my career and what it means for the blog.

But I'll post more on that later. Right now, I want to focus on the last days of my current job. This marks the start of the last 18 days or 10% of the year, which I call the Horton unit. Bookended by the Willis unit that I named after the first girl I met in high school, the Horton unit's namesake is also a girl -- in fact, the last student I met in high school. (We spoke briefly for the first time at graduation practice!) As it turns out, the Horton unit corresponds exactly to my time as a lame duck teacher. In the classroom, it corresponds to the end of the year projects that I'm giving in both my Calculus and Ethnostats classes. 

Now based on the way this project was written, I'd assumed that it came from the district, and that this project is part of the official syllabus for the class. According to the document, the Unit 3 project is a Group Video Project on conditional probabilities related to ethnicity -- and believe that the document comes from the district, I was treating it as gospel. But in reality, it was created my one of my predecessor teachers. And so I don't need to follow this exact project to the letter. Some students appear a little apprehensive about the video. (They also work on Assignment #40, the last Stats article of the year.)

The Calculus will start their own projects next week. This week I fulfilled a tradition that occurs in many Calculus classes -- after the AP exam, I showed them the film Stand and Deliver, about the world's most famous math teacher, Jaime Escalante. One guy tells me that his parents both had Escalante as a teacher, and he helped them pass the exam. In Trig, we moved on to Section 4.6, which is on inverse trig functions and their graphs.

Today is Eightday on the Eleven Calendar:

Resolution #8 -- We are mindful of books and other materials.

The Ethnostats students turn in their final Warm-Up materials of the year. The last Exit Pass of the year is "Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number _____." That's right -- this bookends my first Exit Pass of the year, which I mentioned back in my post on Friday, August 13th. And yes, I mention bookends a lot in this post, but unfortunately, I must deal with some bookends I'd rather not -- starting the year with uncertainty about my new job, and ending it with uncertainty about my next one.

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