The class began by the students constructing test taking barriers. A little context - the class is held in a room that serves as the school's library. It is a large hall with round tables that each seat four.The students all face each other and there aren't any spare desks for them to spread out at to take tests. This has been a problem that Jackie has grappled with last semester. Today, the students working in pairs created physical barriers by taping together two large pieces of cardboard and dividing the table into four spaces. The students took a short quiz on computing variances and standard deviation by hand (5 data values between 1 and 2 up to one place of the decimal). 4 students finish early and go into the adjoining computer lab to look up answers to earlier homeworks.
The teacher has all her lessons organized in Goggle Docs and the class has a website which has the homework answers, notes from each lesson, homework assignments and all class policies. She did an overview of whats on the website and for what she expected from them and what tools she was providing for them to make it through the course. The students know what thye need to finish in one class because the schedule is up on the board. She has just taken over active teaching because the first semester was being taught by her student teacher.
This was followed by a hands-on simulation of the Westvaco case from YMS book. They used graphing calculators to simulate a sample of ten workers from 100. Jackie made them go through the 4 Steps that are expected in an AP answer for a simulation question. She models all the calculator behaviour - spelling out the keys and the functions therein. She also explained "whats syntax?"
On the calculator, they use randInt(1,100,10) to take a sample of ten from 100 workers. They have in their head/ on paper assigned 1-24 as "old" people (she tries to steer them to call them people over 55, but the instinctive categorization is old peole ;-)). They count the numbers 24 or under and plot this count on a graph she has set up on a white board in front of the class. Five to six of them did this more than once - they ended up with 39 dots. The graph was nice and triangular and the most common point was 2. This allowed her to illustrate the relationship between the 24/100 proportion of the population and the 2/10 of the sample.
The class concluded with a Fathom demo of the Westvaco activity. Jackie demonstrated how to create a collection of 100 people, how to use the formula table to assign "55+" and "young" values to the attribute of age(she actually had instructions in the document for two other ways to do this) and then how to take a sample of 10 people from that collection. She moved onto defining a measure but didn't spend much time explaining this(we were running out of time). That concluded the lesson.
Spots that glow :
Things she said -
- Put down 52.6 I am picky
- Don't make my job hard
- says "did good"
- says they all have a chance at passing the AP
