Trying to find math inside everything else

Archive for May, 2014

Legacy

I was talking to some of the senior teachers today and I found out that two of my former students are going to Manhattan College, where my boyfriend is a professor. I don’t know why, but this is really exciting to me. I guess I’m just somewhat attached to my them as they were my first class and now they are graduating, but maybe somehow I can still keep tabs on them and help them out if they need it. (I told them if they take his class that I have access to his gradebook, wink wink.)

My boyfriend, on the other hand, said he would grade their exams right in front of me so he knows who to blame when they can’t do algebra. He can write on their tests, “Looks like Mr. Cleveland didn’t do a good job!”

But I’m sure they’ll do great. I’m pretty proud of them all.

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Throwback Thursday

In previous years I had my statistics unit towards the beginning of the year, thinking that it could serve as a nice foundation when we work with messy problems later in the year. It never really worked out that way.

This year, I decided to move the stats unit to the end of the year, with the intention of using it as a kind of review. Today’s lesson exemplified that. The goal of the lesson was to take a data set and find a regression function for it using the calculator. That part was easy, but the trick was to determine what kind of function it was. So I decided that, for the data sets, I’d use ones we used previously in class, such as from Stacking Cups, The Skittles Lab, World Population, and The Showdown. Back then when we did them we would do things like average the data to make a function, or try to fit a graph on the points using Desmos. Now the calculator unlocked the secrets of precise graphs! (Luckily, no one complained that I didn’t show them before.)

My warm-up was also a matching activity that was on their first exam back in October, so these two things combined caused a student to exclaim that it was Throwback Thursday.

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