We don’t have any major exams or group quizzes in my Stat classes this week.

We didn’t have any last week, either.

And sometime around lunch today, that struck me as quite odd.

Given our current six-weeks grading system, a major exam date — each of which is immediately preceded by a “group quiz” review day — needs to be scheduled about every two-and-half weeks. Since these “group quiz / test” dates don’t involve actively teaching all day, they’re about as close as we get to a break in the schedule.1

And because of the A-B block schedule on which our high schools operate, it is incredibly rare to hit a two-week stretch of classes completely devoid of these cadences.

This is the first time this school year that I’ve had two full work weeks2 of teaching without a major quiz or test.3

But being that teachers are creatures of rhythm and habit, it felt so strange to me that I had to go back and look up previous years’ calendars to figure out the last time this has happened.

It never happened last year.4

Nor did it happen the year before that.

In fact, I haven’t had two straight weeks of actual teaching since three years ago5 at this same spot in the campaign.

And THAT is about the extent of the news-worthiness of week number twenty one.

We are now almost done with inference with proportions, which means we’ve made it through the turbulence, and the rest of the ride is relatively downhill.6

1. And if you know the type of chaos that can ensue in tutorials on these days — never mind the grading — you know that it’s not actually a “break” [↩]
2. as in, 5-day work weeks [↩]
3. Due to the brisk pace of the Fall semester, this is really the first time in the calendar that such a stretch is even possible. [↩]
4. Thanks in part to the ice days. [↩]
5. Season 5, back when I was still using Arial on my calendars [↩]
6. Knock on wood. [↩]