…and that’s one of the hardest parts of being a teacher.

As teachers, we invest so much in our students, that the joys of watching them succeed – even in the smallest of victories – are triumphant moments.

Conversely, it can be excruciatingly difficult to watch a kid that you’re trying your best to help push over the top… only to watch them fall a bit short.1

A wise owl once told me,

You can’t save everyone. You shouldn’t feel like a failure because of that.

I’m not a parent, but I imagine if I was, I’d be better suited in dealing with the feelings associated with knowing that you’re just not going to be able to do everything right.

One of these days, I’ll talk about the single worst day of my teaching life.2 For now, I’ll just say that as you gain experience, you learn to better take the disappointments in stride and refocus quickly on the big[ger] picture.

We are now into the tenth week of the year, and my classroom is suddenly becoming a bit more spacious — sadly though, due to some attrition, and not because the room got any bigger. My largest classes are down to 33 and 34 respectively (both were at 36 a month ago). This is about the time of the year where things start getting tight around the belt, so to speak, in AP Stat.

One of the “goals”3 I set each year is to retain 100% of my students in my Pre-AP/AP classes. You can read the footnotes if you actually want to know how that’s gone.4

For temporal context, this is the “sweet spot” of the calendar for sports fans. The World Series (baseball) is this week5, NBA season kicks off later this week,6 and both College Football and the NFL are in full swing. 7

The new iPad Airs come out on Friday.

The government shutdown came and went (ended last week, in fact).

Oh, incidentally, we just did a problem dealing with a regression analysis about using SAT scores to predict college success8. One part of the exercise led the students to use the low R-squared value to conclude that SAT scores were a poor predictor of how well students actually perform in college, which brought up all sorts of colorful discussion.9

And Halloween is this week. That’s always a fun one in our line of work.

1. or sometimes, woefully short. [↩]
2. that’ll be in February, so some time to come… [↩]
3. I put quotation marks around this word, “goals”, because… well… [↩]
4. I have never come close. I’m not sure any Pre-AP/AP math teacher has — at least on our campus. But I set that as a goal because I hate conceding to the idea of “acceptable loss” in our field. [↩]
5. sadly the Dodgers came up two games short in the NLCS, ending my dream of a Chavez Ravine – Fenway Series that I seriously would’ve flown out for. [↩]
6. though if you’re a Laker fan, it’s “nothing to see here” [↩]
7. Hockey is going on somewhere out there, as well… [↩]
8. specifically, first semester college GPAs [↩]
9. again, much of which I cannot share via this medium — but I’ll just say that it was good to see that these kids… well… they get it. [↩]