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.
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
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.”
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
- you know, the kind that actually counts as a grade [↩]
- Well, last lesson over new material, anyway. We have plenty of review lessons ahead of us until May thirteen. [↩]
- Our ninth hypothesis test, and fifth type of confidence interval. [↩]
- 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. [↩]
- more or less, though I won’t go into the details here. [↩]
- 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. [↩]
- “Furious 6” and “Tokyo Drift” — which were chronologically the last two in the timeline of the plot. Oh, number 7 comes out this weekend! [↩]
- 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… [↩]
- and madness [↩]
- In other words… sorry I’m not sorry. [↩]
- If you get it, you get it. [↩]
- 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. [↩]