Absolutely freaking impeccable timing on the part of the genius(es) at xkcd.1

1. Discovered this beaut on the heels of teaching the hypothesis testing lesson SIX times in a row. This is one of the #firstworldproblem pains of only teaching one prep – you have to teach every lesson six times in a row. Not that I’m actually complaining. [↩]

Every year around this time, things finally start to mesh and fall into place the way you had envisioned from the beginning.1

It’s the sweet spot of the journey at which the screeching actually starts to sound like music.2

Monday, we start teaching kids to reject the Ho.3

They say if ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And by all accounts, very little was “broken” in last year’s journey.

But there was one particular bump in the road last year that came in the form of major exam #7.4 A number of students actually told me that they felt that particular exam was on the edge of “unfair” and unlike what they had practiced in class. I’m not sure how others in my profession take such feedback, but personally, I take stuff like that to heart.5

So the one major adjustment to our program for this campaign came in rewriting the review and exam for this particular segment of the course.6

Well, that exam is tomorrow.

We’ll see how it goes.7

1. If only it didn’t take 19 weeks to get here! [↩]
2. Or it’s merely the calm before the storm — a.k.a., the first major exam of the Spring semester… a.k.a., tomorrow. [↩]
3. #neveraccepttheHo [↩]
4. we have ten major exams throughout the year, before the AP Exam. [↩]
5. Hey, if my students feel comfortable enough with me to actually share that with me, I figure there’s too much smoke for there not to be a fire. [↩]
6. Which, by the way, if you’re curious as to how long it take to rewrite a full exam for my Statistics class: it basically takes two full weekends. If done during the summer break, anywhere from 3-4 days of fulltime work. Like writing a paper, you go through multiple drafts and edits and revisions, etc. [↩]
7. Of course, the first exam after Winter break universally stinks… so………. [↩]

Today was the first day of inferential statistics1 — a.k.a., the beginning of the final forty percent of the course.

This campaign has not been without its challenges, but as I got ready to teach today’s classes I wondered about how we got through the first sixty so briskly.2

We’re into the 18th week of the new school year, and I’m at the point now where every morning when I arrive at work, it almost seems strange to me that the new place feels normal.3

Surely, there is a ways to go, but I’m going to wake up exactly four months from now,4 and it’ll feel like tomorrow.

For now, however, today marked the start of the most brutal three-and-half weeks of the course.5

1. we start with one sample confidence intervals for large samples — a.k.a., 1-prop z-intervals [↩]
2. Incidentally, I probably also had my worst teaching day of the year this morning. Just goes to show, we all have our off-days. [↩]
3. Yet ironically, I still have days where we’ll get to 4:05pm and I’ll wonder why the bell isn’t ringing. [↩]
4. on Exam Day number five [↩]
5. If you’re curioous: intro to confidence intervals, hypothesis tests, type I/II errors, and power. [↩]

Every once in a handful of blue moons, society is gifted with an individual that is so good at what they do, that brings so much passion and joy to what they do, that you stop, and take some time out of your life to watch them do their thing, because getting the chance to see them on their stage, in their element, is just that special.

Freshman year of college, my Dobie suite-mates and I would often gather around the TV in the evenings to catch SportsCenter so that — among other things1 — we could see him going at it and doing his thing — on his stage, in his element. It was damn near family hour for us. And it never got old.

Damn. There isn’t much I can say to do his memory justice, but I will say this:

Nowadays, anytime I turn my pillow over in the middle of the night, I think about Stuart Scott.

R.I.P., Stuart Scott.

1. We were all huge sports fans, in particular basketball fans. Among other things, that was the year Dennis Rodman joined the Bulls, when they went on to win 72 games. [↩]

Although students will walk back into my class on Tuesday, we won’t actually start the second semester “for real” until Wednesday.1 This is because three years ago, I started the practice of putting my B-day classes in front of my A-day classes for the entire second semester in AP Stat.2 The following is some background as to why I started doing this.

Each year at the start of the first major exam3 in AP Statistics, I put a brief “honor statement” at the top of the first page for students to sign.4
Just below is a shot of said honor statement:

Here’s the crucial text (in case you’re on a small screen):

HONOR STATEMENT: I understand that Mr. Youn expects that I will never discuss (nor have I discussed) the contents of any quiz or test with anybody else until we review it together as a class. This gives all of my classmates a fair chance at taking this test. I will respect my classmates by following these expectations at all times.

Please sign if you agree: _______________

I’m not naïve — there is no way to completely eliminate cheating.5 However, there are, quite honestly, a large number of students who don’t even realize that the behavior described in this paragraph is considered an act of scholastic dishonesty. The purpose of this exercise is merely to communicate our expectations to them. 6

Back when I was a senior in high school, our teachers would explain to us that we — meaning students — were competing with one another for spots in college, and thus, it ought to make sense for us to NOT want to discuss contents of an exam that we had just taken with friends of ours who were taking the same class in a later period that day.

But even in the “dark-age” absence of cellphones and social media,7 we had trouble keeping secrets. 8

These days, kids at my school are on an A/B block schedule, in which we have 8 total class periods, but only four 90-minute classes each day — so it takes a cycle of two days to get through all 8 classes. This, in theory, allows students to disseminate contents of, oh say, that day’s evil exam in AP Stat in between days.9 Oh, and not to mention, kids these days have incredibly sharp camera phones, and social media, and messaging apps galore.10

In theory, this gives a perpetual advantage to the kids who have classes on “B” days, as their classes — and thus, exams — are systematically a day later than for students who have the same classes on “A” days. 11

And this is one of the main reasons that I started teaching my classes B-day first for the entire second semester — it gives the B-day students a chance to be at the front of the line, and to make it through a semester sans the luxury of hearing about the next day’s class from their A-day friends.12

But the much bigger reason I choose to start with my B-day classes every January?

After hibernating for two weeks,13 who the heck is prepared to teach a tough lesson on sampling distributions14 the first day back? 15

The following is a charming16 xkcd that touches on the universe of pain in which we’ll be living for much the duration of the second semester: Inference.17

1. Tuesday will end up being some sort of review and/or data collection activity. Nothing that is overly “processor-intensive”. [↩]
2. I have also done this in Pre-AP Algebra II a couple of times, but more for reasons related to bad-weather days or other disruptions in the calendar. [↩]
3. Incidentally, the first major exam of the year has been falling on — or very close to — September 11 [↩]
4. and hopefully, read [↩]
5. A law-school friend of mine once pointed me to a study that indicates that institutions of higher education that make students aware of an honor code actually have higher incidences of scholastic dishonesty than schools that don’t… but I have to think that has more to do with the competitiveness of the students that attend such institutions, rather than the presence of an honor code itself. [↩]
6. Oh, it also provides excellent fodder for the “sensitive questions” activity that I pull on them much later in the year, after the last major class exam. [↩]
7. And I don’t even mean SMARTphones. Cellular phones didn’t become ubiquitous among consumers until I was midway through college. Like I said. Dark ages. [↩]
8. This perhaps begs the question of which code teenagers respect more: the code of honor or the code of friends? I’m sure there’s a lesson on game theory in there somewhere… [↩]
9. not to mention in between class periods [↩]
10. Oh, how I cannot wait for communicating during exams via smart watch starts to become a thing… </sarcasm> [↩]
11. When you teach the kids at the higher ranks, this kind of stuff is not insignificant. Last year — Season 7 — I taught the entire senior class top 10… that was an interesting dynamic at times. [↩]
12. Not that this approach solves everything — with this regard, kids with class later in the day will always have an advantage over kids who are in the morning periods, etc. But it does mix things up a little, at least. [↩]
13. And oh boy, after a grueling stretch run to close the first semester, this Winter Break was closer to hibernation than any Winter Break I’ve had since college… [↩]
14. and in the second semester of any math class, the first lesson is never light-weight [↩]
15. That’s the code I prefer to go by: the code of mental self-preservation. [↩]
16. well, *I* think it’s charming [↩]
17. After “Inception” and “Interstellar”, I’d like to a Christopher Nolan flick about “Inference”. Like his other stuff, you’d have to be genius to understand it… [↩]