I had my first bad day of the year on Thursday.1

It actually was not even a bad day, per se, rather one bad class period. But as any teacher will tell you, that’s all it takes.2

The bitter taste I had for most of the day took me back to my first year, when I remember having to struggle with this sort of thing a bit more often:

When you teach on a block schedule,3 and you have a bad day, you have to wait TWO days before you get a chance to redeem yourself with that same group of kids. And if that bad day happens on a Thursday — as yesterday did — then you have to endure that foul taste in your mouth for the next four days — all the way through the weekend until the following Monday.

And that stinks.4 5

1. Considering that it took until week 6, perhaps that’s not that bad. [↩]
2. And actually… as any teacher will tell you – it takes far less than an entire class. [↩]
3. “Block” schedule, meaning: Four 90-minute classes each day, with alternating days for 8 periods total. [↩]
4. But just to be clear, this is just one negative aspect of block scheduling — there are numerous reasons for which I MUCH prefer 90-minute block periods to traditional 50-minute classes. [↩]
5. Also by the way: the rest of this week was wonderful. But it only takes one hour. It’s sadly true: Negativity has so much dominating power. [↩]

I woke up on Monday thinking, “If this week is anything like last, it will end me.”

We are past hump-day and it has not ended me.

Thankful.

Today1 was the “Burgers and Boxplots” lesson. I love this one, for obvious reasons. 2

It made me happy to know that a much larger proportion of my students are now familiar with Carls Jr.3 and In-N-Out than in previous years. :)

The Mega Tamago gets ’em every time, though:4

Mmmmm hmmmmm. 5

Oh, the point of the lesson was to analyze the distribution of fat grams in a number of fast-food burgers, and to identify the median / quartiles / 5-number summary, run the 1.5IQR outlier test, and sketch a modified box plot.6 7

When I stop to think — and breathe — it blows my mind a bit when I realize that we’re already in week 6. I know, it’s early, but… the overwhelming feeling I have is that the rest of this year is going to go by far too quickly.

1. and yesterday, for A-day [↩]
2. Because I’m a burger freak. Now you know. [↩]
3. The Double Western: 63 grams of fat! [↩]
4. 65 grams of fat! [↩]
5. Of course, we needed to point out that as with any McDonald’s burger, the picture makes it look WAY bigger — and nicer — than the actual thing. I told them to use Google to look for real pictures of the thing just for kicks. [↩]
6. Incidentally, the Wendy’s Baconator Triple has 81 grams of fat. That might be an outlier… [↩]
7. A student asked me today if I was familiar with the Gourdough’s Burger. I had to explain that this was a wonderful creation that unfortunately came into existence too late in my life… sigh. [↩]