This is sooo hard!

Date of class- Jan 29th.

Today's class was a very unsettling experience. Jackie spent large parts of time just dealing with expectations, behaviour patterns and habits of mind. Plenty of spots that glow in terms of how much effort she puts into the class but hard for me to write up in terms of what it meant as class that will work with technology.

Before I forget too much about what happened in this class, I will record a few main themes and then elaborate on them later

• Get Help - use wikipedia, parents, teachers and peers
• Think before you speak and know when you are conjecturing
• Fill holes left by first semester teaching
• Teach new topic for 20 minutes - planned to do Fathom demo but no time
• Use your time - be intellectual - plenty to keep you busy even if you know nothing on quiz.
  

Missed opportunity?

The class on January 22nd was an unsettling experience. The students were being walked through a quiz that they had taken on the Tuesday prior to this class. They had all done really badly in that quiz. It was a very basic quiz on reviewing variance and made Jackie revisit her planned scheduling of the chapters. The quiz revealed a lot of "holes" in their earlier learning.

The entire time was spent in going over the quiz and ten the last 20 minutes were allotted to doing homework. Homework not being done is one of the root causes why it is hard for Jackie to ensure that the students get enough practice in basic simulation techniques. Modeling the problem and then converting it to "numbers" is hard when they mostly only do that in class.

I feel that the use of Fathom in this situation would have been a very valuable exercise. It would have been a visual approach to explain a concept that they are having trouble seeing. A way to provide yet another mental anchor for them to recall how it is done.

Maybe it was very demoralizing to discover just how much there is to make up which led to Fathom not being an option. To me even as an outside observer, it a downer to watch some of the classroom interactions and notice the complete lack of commitment to learning. Of special note is the return of two boys who had missed almost a month of school. They appeared to not care at all and weren't working on their homework when given the time. They weren't sitting in any group but seemed to have succeeded in reducing the general level of engagement in the work. She did say however that homework submission rate has gone up to 12-13 out of 23 from 1-2 out of 23.

There is one student who begins to standout for me. He appears to turn in all his homework - doesn't always understand everything or have the right answers but always answers in class. In some ways, he seems to be think out aloud in class and then work out what he needs to get to the answer. In the time allotted for doing homework, he made sure that his table partner was helping him with getting the work done. The table of 4 was to have worked together but in fact only teo of them were working. The girl who was workign with him seems to be better at the actual work but I have a feeling that his motivaiton to plow through all the work was what got her going. I need to watch them more and look for more interactions that tell me something.

Spots that glow:
Today's spots have more to do with my struggle with role and bias rather than with anything that happened in class.

When, Jackie didn't use Fathom to demonstrate the idea of a probability simulation, I was in a dilemma around how much I should influence what happens in this classroom. I wanted to point out the opportunity but didn't. The conflict was a result of my perception of my role in that space. I am struggling trying to reconcile whether I should bring attention to occasions where I believe technology may have been used to good effect. If I do then, I am an actor in the space not just an observer. If I don't then I am depriving the students of a learning opportunity. In the end, is it more important to antiseptically (without contamination) document what happens or intervene and help the learning situation. I don't have the answer that works for me...

Group Quiz - Probability

Today was a no Fathom day. Jackie moves the groups around each chapter, so that the students had moved from their earlier places. 19 of the students were present.

The class was taking a group quiz on Probability. The class was divided into groups of four (one group had 3). In the end, she picked one paper at random from the group too use as the group grade for the test - so they had to make sure that all of them had all their work on their papers. they were allowed to use calculators but asked to show all their work (For some this meant that they showed the addition when calculating the mean). She had a conversation about how much work is enough for the AP exam. The course is very AP exam oriented - she is always teaching them techniques for the test like attempt all questions. "If you answer a question, whatever you put down gives you a greater chance of scoring than a blank answer".

The quiz consisted of 3 questions.

1. Review question: Data in integers(100-150) about ninja turtle weights. They had to calculate the mean, variance and standard deviation. everyone knew how to do this, they "showed" their work in varying degrees of clarity. She reassured tham that AP examiners are atrained to look for the correct bits of their answer rather than the wrong bits. "They are asked to give marks for whatever is right rather than cut marks for what is wrong" In the second part, they had to calculate the 5 number summary(Q1, median, Q3, IQR, min, max) and use that to draw a box plot. 3 out of 5 groups drew a nice symmetric box plot with the right numbers but not scaled properly.


2. Card-Based Simulation: This question called for them to do a simulation of drawing 3 cards from the same suit in a five-card hand using the calculator. There were multiple parts to this question - including a review of basic information about cards. They had to assign numbers to the cards. Most groups assigned numbers from 1-52, but made an assumption that 1-13 would denote success and the rest failure. Only one group got the idea that they needed to divide the cards into four groups with equal number of cards. However, they used numbers between 00 and 99, thereby showing understanding of the probabilities involved but not simulating the underlying situation.
   

   The rest of the question was to create part of a tree diagram that reflected the solution space that captures the situation of 3 cards from the same suit in a five-card draw. The students have quite a few time management issues and noone actually finished the tree diagram.

3. This was the part hich asked them to create an entire tree diagram. But noone got to this bit in the quiz.
   

Spots that glow:

• There was a line printed at the top of the quiz in (tiny) 7 point font, saying" If you read this go get a raffle ticket from the sink counter" She had put out only 10 tickets for 19 students. Her goal was two fold -
  1. Emphasize the importance of reading everything. Part of the struggle for this class of students is language. So Read the fine print and read absolutely everything that is in front of you is a very important exam and life skill that she is teaching.
  2. The other was to show that since only ten tickets were out there, some students were going to be more luck than others. However, she emphasized that all students had an equal chance of being lucky and they made their own luck by reading everything.
     
  In the end, only six students picked up tickets. All of them were from one side of the room (three each from two groups).
  
• In the second question, she asked them to name the four suits of cards and the cards themselves because she discovered that enough of them didn't know the basic information about a pack of cards. To a person like me who grew up playing cards every afternoon in my summer vacation, it seemed strange that these children had got to senior year in school without exposure to a deck of cards.
  
• Towards the end of the class, she spent ten minutes introducing Venn diagrams as a way to think of probability. Jackie divided the class in two groups based on gender and grade level. She said that either you are a male and if you are not a male then you are a female. To which one student piped with a "...unless you are..." - I was amazed at the speed with which she quelled this by a "that is way more information that we need at this point." what was more amazing to me was the fact that no other students said another word and neither was there any side conversation. To me it is another example of how Jackie works to keep the class on task and push distractions out the door before they have even had a chance to make it in.