March 2015 Posts

World Four One

Maroon9

lakitu-8-bit
Eleven years ago today, Google introduced the world to Gmail, with an unbelievable 1GB of free storage.1 Like everyone else in 2004, I thought it had to be an April Fool’s joke. 2

Say what you will about Google as a company3 — they have had some GREAT April Fool’s jokes4 — their Animal Translator will always be one of my all-time faves. 5

I’ve always wanted to incorporate a crazy April Fool’s joke in my class, but I could never get around to planning anything that was worthy. In fact, the only prank I’ve ever really planned that might have been a decent one, I didn’t actually have the nerve to pull off:

It involved teaching the first day of class of the year with a really bad asian accent6 for the entire class period. 7 The rub would be that I would only do that for ONE class period, and not the other two8 so that when those kids would talk to people in my other classes, their friends would be like, “What the heck are you talking about? I understood him just fine!” Ahhh… if only I’d had the nerve.9 10

Asian Accent

Incidentally, tomorrow is April 1st, and we are STAAR testing tomorrow…

  1. Hotmail was the king of the hill for webmail in the day, and they offered a measly 2 megabytes. If you’re tech-illit, 1GB is a thousand megabytes. [↩]
  2. Ah… 2004. That’s the year the Lakers had Karl Malone and Gary Payton. Along with Shaq, and rape-trial Kobe. A couple of months after Google introduced Gmail, while I was overseas, the Lakers traded Shaq. I wished that was an April Fool’s joke… [↩]
  3. hint: I don’t trust them. [↩]
  4. One of these years on April 1st, Google will announce that they’re changing their name to “Skynet”… only it won’t be a joke. [↩]
  5. Perhaps my favorite April Fool’s joke ever, however, was the EGM Street Fighter II “Sheng Long” dig. You’d have to be my particular generation of vino to appreciate that one… [↩]
  6. you know, the kind that you get with those college TA’s that makes you fear for the future of your academic well being… [↩]
  7. Intended effect: Kids would walk out of class saying things like “oh $#!& I gotta drop this class, I can’t understand a think he’s saying [↩]
  8. since we teach on a block schedule, we teach 3 classes a day with one planning period [↩]
  9. Or the ability to actually fake a really bad asian accent. That’s actually really difficult to do for 90 minutes… [↩]
  10. As it is, this was a prank I could never pull off back at McNeil since everyone knew who I was already — and similarly I won’t be able to do it next year at Round Rock — so the boat has sailed on this one. [↩]
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So Fast, So Furious

Maroon9

Last class block, my A-day students took a Harry Potter Sorting Hat House Quiz as part of our lesson over Chi-squared tests of independence.

One thing I learned during this lesson from my students: Apparently "Hufflepuff is for losers"...
One thing I learned during this lesson from my students: Apparently “Hufflepuff is for losers”…

Today, they took an actual quiz1 over chi-squared tests.

Still trying to figure out which one they put more effort into…

Tomorrow we teach the final lesson of the school year2 over inference with regression slope — which at this point, will just feel like another chip off of the old block.3

image

I spent a few minutes this afternoon reviewing the script and slides for tomorrow. Like I do every year at this point in the campaign, I stopped for a moment and focused a bit on those words,4 and I thought back to last year at this time, when I knew5 that it really would be.6

Later in the evening I spent some time watching the last two “Fast and Furious” movies7 with the director’s commentary. I lovelovelove! hearing the director’s8 take on all of the behind-the-scenes details about how everything is intricately pieced together to make the magic happen on the screen. And, man I dig that stuff because, like it probably is with being a coach in sports, or being an actor in theatre, behind-the-scenes is where all of the work takes place. Once you step out on stage, or on the court, or even in the classroom when the students start walking in, the work has really already been done — the actual classes — or “performances” — are usually the easy part.

But as I was staring at those words, it was one of those frozen moments where I halted myself in the middle of the piano piece to stop and think about the complexity of what I was actually playing, just for the sake of stopping to appreciate the beauty9 of said complexity.

I also thought about how it was simultaneously immensely challenging and also incredibly fortuitous for me personally this year, starting over in the new place, getting some of the pieces to fit in place and also having others fall perfectly into place, that just for the briefest of moments this afternoon while staring at those words, I breathed a sigh and thought to myself in that quiet moment:

“Somehow… I survived.”

I took this shot during a morning stroll at Town Lake during Spring Break. I don't usually make the turn off the trail to this spot, and I don't know why I did on this particular day, but I'm glad I did. I got there just as this bird was splashing around, bathing itself, spreading its wings. In that moment, it was... so apt.
I took this shot during a morning stroll at Town Lake during Spring Break. I don’t usually make the turn off the trail to this spot, and I don’t know why I did on this particular day, but I’m glad I did. I got there just as this bird was splashing around, bathing itself, spreading its wings. In that moment, it was… so apt.

Oh, about the title of this post… sorry, I couldn’t help it. 10 No joke, I wanted a shirt for this Thursday that reads, “I like the tuna here”11 but I couldn’t find one that I actually liked. 12

  1. you know, the kind that actually counts as a grade [↩]
  2. Well, last lesson over new material, anyway. We have plenty of review lessons ahead of us until May thirteen. [↩]
  3. Our ninth hypothesis test, and fifth type of confidence interval. [↩]
  4. This point in Season 1 of AP Stat — 2010-11 — I almost literally threw myself a party when I made it to the end of the textbook. The amount of time and work it took to make it through year 1 of AP Stat… that moment is still one of the largest celebratory moments of my teaching life, even to this day. [↩]
  5. more or less, though I won’t go into the details here. [↩]
  6. at least for my time at McNeil. A year ago at this time I didn’t yet know for sure where I would end up. [↩]
  7. “Furious 6” and “Tokyo Drift” — which were chronologically the last two in the timeline of the plot. Oh, number 7 comes out this weekend! [↩]
  8. Justin Lin! Cypress High alum! Man, I’m gonna miss him in the series. I know there were rumors about him coming back for eight and nine, but I think he might have his hands busy with Star Trek 3. Plus the dude is a Cypress High alum… [↩]
  9. and madness [↩]
  10. In other words… sorry I’m not sorry. [↩]
  11. If you get it, you get it. [↩]
  12. Originally the title of this post was “so fast, so far” — a deliberate twist on the more usual phrase “so far, so fast”, which sums up my feelings about being at this point in the campaign. [↩]
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Chop Wood

Can't make this stuff up, Maroon9

About ten seconds into today’s lesson:1

Student #1: Have you ever taught ESL?2
Me: What?? No…
Student #1: You’d be good at it.
Me: Why?!…
Student #1: You’re very patient.
Me: Oh… okay. [insert slight pensive pause] Actually… I’m really not; I just act like it in front of you guys…
Student #2:3 So when you go home do you just let it all out and “rraaAAWWwwrrr”4 and like, chop wood? 5
Me: [looking dumbfounded and possessing no idea where to go with that]… okay so, the null and alternative hypothesis for this problem… … …
(oh... chop wood... I see what you did there...)
(oh… chop wood… I see what you did there…)

I am filing this one under “Can’t make this stuff up.” 6

For the ninth time in my teaching life7 I was reminded how brutal it is the first couple of days back from Spring Break.

I mean, brutalbrutalbrutal!.8

Perhaps I found my footing sometime today9 but good night, could we please make Spring Break two weeks long?!

keep-calm-and-karate-chop-10

  1. which was the M&M’s Chi-squared goodness-of-fit lesson [↩]
  2. ESL: English as a Second Language. Not sure we really call it that anymore… [↩]
  3. This particular character is a fast-talker, for context. If you watch “Scandal”, picture highly caffeinated Quinn Perkins. [↩]
  4. yes, this kid literally roared and waved her arms around in psycho karate fashion, to boot. [↩]
  5. WHAT. [↩]
  6. Yes, I created a new category of posts just for this one. [↩]
  7. This is my ninth year of teaching… [↩]
  8. Yes – there’s a factorial at the end of that last nested exponent! [↩]
  9. about the time the above “wood-chopping” conversation occurred — which, for the record, was during my 5th attempt of teaching the same class. -_- [↩]
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Not Pure Joy (nor Fight Club)

Maroon9

This is what a stack of 150+ seven page exams looks like.1

image

After the students have fled, I’ll put on my coffeehouse jazz playlist on my iPod2 and dig in.3 While grading papers can sometimes be oddly therapeutic, I’d rather not do any more than absolutely necessary.

I grade these things page-by-page, so as to maintain some consistency in how I grant partial credit between classes. I also usually start grading from the last page of each exam — because the latter half of each test contains the open-ended free response questions that take wayyy long to grade — and move my way to the front of each exam — which house the much quicker multiple choice questions.4

I’d estimate that it takes about three solid hours to work through 3 classes worth,5 so I try to start while the next class period is taking the exam. I’ve learned the hard way: every minute that you can be efficient with counts.

This is test #9 of the year,6 and for the first time this campaign, after grading a particularly painful free-response question7 question one hundred fifty-some times, I thought to myself,

Thank God I don’t EVER have to grade this question again…8

IMG_2018

Only four more lessons until the start of the “postseason”. Time has wings, indeed…

  1. Writing that reminds me of the line early in Jerry Maguire, where Tom Cruise narrates the kid baseball player hitting a deep ball with: “Check out what pure looks like.” Well… this would be the opposite. I can also picture a student reading this, thinking, “Maybe you should just give us shorter exams!” :p [↩]
  2. silver 80GB Classic… vintage by today’s standards. [↩]
  3. If you’re curious, “The Prestige” is playing in the background.” [↩]
  4. If you’re reading this thinking, “You give multiple choice questions!? How easy!!!” then I have a couple of hundred statistics students ready to throw daggers in your general direction. [↩]
  5. so one A-day or B-day’s worth [↩]
  6. and only one more to go! [↩]
  7. the one about the DC Schools cheating scandal from a few years back [↩]
  8. well, until next year. [↩]
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Go for gold

Maroon9

During my usual pre-exam spiel today:

Me: No notes, no cellphones, no internet… no FaceTime-ing your friends across the room during the test…
Kid: Can we use an Apple Watch?
Me: Mmmm… if you get the gold one, I’ll think about it.

They laughed.1

They knew I was joking.

…

…

…

I hope they knew I was joking…

  1. In case you hadn’t heard, them things are kinda expensive. [↩]
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