Stats, Common Core Style

I'll begin with a description of today, in "A Day in the Life" format. This is a monthly minimum day and so it counts as my monthly "Day in the Life" post, but it also doubles as the special day "last day before Thanksgiving break." 8:00  -- Even though I no longer have a first period, something significant does happen at this time -- a power outage. It lasts throughout first period and continues into second. 8:40  -- Second period arrives. This is the first of two Ethnostats classes. Going into today, I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with this class. I was considering having them wrap up the data collection project from this week, but that's a Google spreadsheet, which they won't be able to access during the power outage. (Even if some of the classroom Chromebooks have juice in them, they won't be able to use the wi-fi.) Also, I was thinking back five years to the old charter school when I assigned a turkey graph. This was a bad...

Today is the day of my visit to the main high school, to see an experienced Calculus teacher at work. I will describe the details of this visit in "A Day in the Life" format. But first, let me explain the bell schedule at this school. Like my own school, this flagship school has a block schedule, but the two schedules are completely different. A few years ago, I wrote about how block schedules work at different schools. A traditional six-period day (like regular Mondays at my home school) have classes of a little less than a hour each. We can naively combine two periods at a time into blocks, but the resulting classes would be about two hours long. Hardly any block schedule school actually does this -- instead, almost every block schedule school does something to shorten the classes somewhat. My home school, for example has an extra period (Advisory, a sort of zero period), while other schools have a seventh period. Other districts have two-hour blocks, but devote the last 20...

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 be...

Here in California, this week is Veteran's Day, which is observed on November 11th no matter what day of the week it is. This year it falls on a Thursday. Years in which Vets Day falls on a Thursday (or Tuesday) are problematic, because it leaves a lone workday on Friday (or Monday). Some districts, including mine, have a simple solution -- there's no school on Friday either. Thus Veteran's Day forms a four-day weekend in my district. Unlike the past few weeks, when a minimum day shifts the block schedule up to Monday, this week there is no change to the block schedule -- losing both Thursday and Friday keeps the schedule balanced. And so yesterday was a regular all-classes Monday, today is odd periods, and tomorrow will be even periods. Moreover, this week marks the end of the first "quarter" -- a misnomer, since it really indicates that we are two-thirds of the way through the semester. (The flagship high school had progress reports at the end of the first term,...

Today is the first day of school since the end of Daylight Saving Time this year, with the clocks set back one hour. On the old blog, I would write biannual posts about Daylight Saving Time and whether it would be better to have Year-Round DST instead. But now that I've become a full-time teacher, I have less time to write about other issues like DST and need to focus on what's going on in the classroom. (Actually, I do have something to say about the clock in my classroom -- it has never worked, always taking more than 60 minutes to tick off one hour. Thus it showed the wrong time both before and after the DST clock change. I've asked for someone to fix my clock but to no avail.) I will write briefly about the clock change -- three years ago, Proposition 7 passed, allowing for California to implement Year-Round DST. But it can't happen until Congress allows for it -- and unless there's something about Year-Round DST in that big infrastructure bill that passed, Year...

Today is a minimum day, when teachers get to go home early due to last week's Parent Conferences. It is not officially a monthly  minimum day, and hence this is not "A Day in the Life" post. But something big happened to me this week, and so I write about it in an extended post -- just not "A Day in the Life." This week I received my second parent complaint. The principal didn't divulge who exactly made the complaint, but the student is in my Calculus class. Based on some of the information she gave me, I think I can figure out who it is, as well as the incident that triggered the complaint. It all started about three weeks ago, on the day of the second DeltaMath quiz (on Sections 3.1-3.3). Of the six students in my class, four of them earned a C or better, one girl earned a D, and the last girl was absent and didn't take the quiz at all. When she returned to school the following week, she asked to make up the quiz she missed -- and the girl who got a D ...

Recall that at my school, regular teachers often have to cover classes during conference period. There's no way around it -- on most days, 100% of available subs must cover elementary classes. This week marks the first time that I've had to cover for the other math teacher -- an event made possible once my first period Stats class collapsed and the lone student in that class switched to fifth period. Before then, both of us math teachers had the same prep period, so we couldn't cover each other. As it turns out, my partner teacher was present on campus today. The reason I must cover her class is, as the longest-tenured teacher at the school (here since the school first opened five years ago), she must serve as the substitute principal  when the administrators have a meeting. Her first period class is Integrated Math III, consisting mainly of juniors. On Monday, she set up an Edpuzzle on solving systems of (two) linear equations. She's a regular user of Edpuzzle, but she...