In my seven-and-a-half years of teaching, I have tried very hard to avoid any serious “foot-in-mouth” moments,1 but this past Thursday, as I was introducing my student teacher to my 2nd period Geometry class, I had one.

See, I was explaining to my students that my student teacher effectively has full authority in the classroom now, and that if they wanted to use the restroom or get a drink of water, they would have to ask her, and not me.

Well, one kid asked, “Mister Youn, if we ask her and she says ‘no’, then can we ask you?” 2

So I replied, “Okay, this is NOT like at home, where you ask one parent, and if they say ‘no’ then you go and ask the OTHER parent the same thing.” 3

{insert whooshing sound of foot flying in from nowhere and landing swiftly in my mouth}

The next ten seconds sounded something like:

Sigh. :(

Between snow days4 and allergy days5 we may have well spent this entire last week in AP Stat playing cards and hopscotch.

My A-day classes have yet to begin hypothesis testing, and in order to get back on schedule, it looks as if I may have to teach 2-sample procedures without teaching students the formulas.6

I’ve taught all of the inference formulas every year thus far,7 but once we start preparing for the AP exam, many teachers8 instruct their students to skip them and just use the calculator to get the answer.9

This has been one of the more frequently mentioned concerns on my end-of-year feedback forms (“if we don’t need to know the inference formulas, why do we waste so much time learning them?!” etc etc), and over the course of the past year or so, I’ve begun to ask myself the same thing.10 Hopefully everything will turn out just fine and we’ll have these ice days to thank for helping us to turn a new page.

1. you know, when you say something that you immediately wish you could “un-speak”… [↩]
2. perhaps you see where this is going… [↩]
3. raise your hand if you saw that coming, and NOW see where this is going… [↩]
4. which, by the way, lacked any semblance of actual snow [↩]
5. pretty much every day here in Austin [↩]
6. and to just perform the hypothesis tests on their graphing calculators [↩]
7. and with 2-sample proportions z-tests, the formulas are one of the worst parts of the course [↩]
8. myself included [↩]
9. which is completely acceptable on the Exam [↩]
10. Perhaps this falls under the category of “teaching things right” vs “teaching to a test”, but I don’t even know about that. [↩]