Month: October 2022

Flip The Switch. Ho Ho Ho…

Source

Our A/B block schedule gifted me with a singleton Red Day this week. It will pair up with an e-learning day on Election Day next week. But for this day, I needed a project.

To keep my classes in synch I’ve been using those days as one-off activity days. This year it’s not just a change of pace, it keeps everyone sharp as we continue our transition to project-based learning. As an added bonus I got a partner in crime. I shared my slide deck for the project with my geometry teammates, my instructional coach, and my department chair. My next door neighbor teacher was willing to go along for the ride.

Like many major cities, one radio station in Chicago changes its format to 24/7 holiday music every year during November and December. It’s become a bit of a parlor game to guess when the FM Lite will flip the switch. The earliest date? November 2, back in 2006 and 2007. Here’s the history, and a graphic look at the ratings bump.

Seems like a good opportunity to make predictions (based on admittedly limited information – what kid listens to radio, much less pays any kind of attention to when a radio station changes formats), explore/research the topic, then analyze data using appropriate tools. So math, yes, but also pushing our way up Bloom’s taxonomy, right?)

I’ve been using this activity with my in-person classes for a few years. The slide deck has evolved a bit since 2019 and I’m pretty happy with its current form but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t remix it and make it better.

I should point out that we don’t play Christmas music during the activity, and I’m upfront with my students that the “guess the date” is really just a timely way to generate data. I could have asked them the day of the month their birthday falls on or the last two digits of their street address or something else.

And the soundtrack? The 2023 version of my student-generated Friday Playlist.

Students start by guessing the date they think the switch will occur, and give a justification for why they think the station will change that day. Then I ask, what if we had more info, would that help you make a more accurate guess?

I share a Robert Feder column with some of the recent history of the changeover date. I years past I used this time to go into the spreadsheet that holds their responses and add a column that contains the number of days after Halloween to the date they guessed, computed manually by me.

Then this year I learned that there is a DAYS function in Sheets that will automate that process. So sweet.

What can we do with this data set?

Contrast and compare, duh. I pulled the data from a group of classes last year and used that as the comparison.

Students go to Desmos, create a dotplot of the data, insert link to their dotplot as well as a png into a slide.

“What’s that big gap around Day 40 about, you guys? And why the big spike between Days 25-30?”

I assume it’s been a minute since they interpreted dot plots so I point them to a quick refresher. Then a brief reflection (“Think about a time you made a decision and did some research first. What was the decision and how did it work out?) and we’re good to go.

The Which One Doen’t Belong makes for an outstanding setup to the activity. I tell my kids that WODB serves multiple purposes in our class:

  • Instant SMP 3 (taking a position and defending that position)
  • An opportunity to use appropriate math vocabulary in context
  • An opportunity to practice noticing subtle similarities and differences

I obviously can’t use this activity in exactly this format for an e-day activity. That group will get a chance to make a prediction (the flip will probably have already happened by then but who knows?) then they’ll get a slide with the two dotplots and do the contrast and compare. Reflection too. Those are the money parts anyway.

My Red Day kids? We’ll hang out together on Halloween, prove some lines are parallel, maybe sneak in a Nevada Day reference, and groove to Bow Wow Wow.

See what I did there?

Because on Tuesday, Mariah awaits…

Growth

I’m a long-time Sunset On The Beach guy. But the sunsets over the mountains are pretty fabulous too.

Spent part of my Fall Break in Vegas. And before you start wondering where I am on the pay scale and start filling out an application for my district (which you absolutely should do anyway), my wife’s company held its senior leadership strategic planning retreat there, spouses invited, travel and lodging paid and a per diem for meals. Definitely teacher-budget-friendly.

For me it was my first time back in the city in six years, and it was the first time Mrs. Dull and I had both been there together since we moved back to the Region in 2005.

If you know anything about Vegas, you know 17 years is enough time for the Strip to re-invent itself, twice over.

Over my shoulder: Mirage, TI, Caesar’s, practically old-school. The new breed of properties are enormous.

The company dinner was about a mile walk from our hotel, and I also did a little exploring on foot the next morning. The Strip is cleaner than I remember, and the dayworkers passing out handbills for escort services are nowhere to be found. Due to a recent outbreak of high-profile violent crime in the city as a whole there is a noticably beefed-up Metro presence on the Strip, and also an uptick in the number of persons experiencing homelessness. Partly thanks to its climate Vegas has always been a hub for unhoused folks all up and down the West Coast, but my guess is the encampments in the parks and other “out-of-the-way” places are far less safe than they were a couple of decades ago.

But the thing that jumped out at Mrs. Dull, who has been coming to Las Vegas for family reasons since the ’80s, is the new breed of casinos. Behemoths. And they rise like cliffs right from the sidewalk on Las Vegas Boulevard. The old-school places came right up to the sidewalk too, but with open-air entrances right to a gaming room, typically with looser slots to lure you in. The new places are nothing like that.

And once inside? Well casinos have always existed to separate patrons from their money but in modern day times they’ve taken it to heights previously unknown.

Like, there’s a Keurig in the room but you want coffee to put in that machine? Gotta buy it from the minibar. Or head downstairs to Starbucks.

You want coffee in your room, stay on the Boulder Strip or something.

The other big change? The city’s population has almost doubled since we left.

Source, with full graph

From 1,589,000 in 2005 to 2,839,000 in 2022. The population is expected to reach three million in 2025. Flying in we could see upscale new neighborhoods being built up the mountainsides. All at a time when Lake Mead, the source of water for pretty much the entire Southwest including Vegas, Phoenix, and much of Southern California, is at its lowest level since Hoover Dam was built 90 years ago.

The city is growing at a rate of about 3% per year, and the median home price is almost $450,000, up 15% year-over-year. In a city where the median household income is $58,377.

We went and checked out the old neighborhood. Our exit off the 95 brought us to some familiar sights. But the next exit, Summerlin Parkway? It’s built to bypass the surface streets and the neighborhoods and deliver all the folks who live up the sides of the mountain to their master-planned communities. Riff-raff, stay out.

The Strip is not built for middle class folks. The growth in the city is not built for middle class folks.

Whoever it is built for these days, it’s working.

Source

Those revenue numbers are in thousands. So statewide casinos took in $13.4 billion last year. That’s an increase of almost 40% since the turn of the century.

It was my wife’s work trip but it wasn’t all fun and games for me. I was selected for an education policy fellowship this year, and we had our virtual monthly meeting on Monday. I spent the morning doing my pre-work then joined the Zoom call from my hotel room. On the agenda was a presentation and question-and-answer session with Robert Enlow of EdChoice, Inc. on the history of education reform in Indiana.

It was a deeply researched and wide-ranging discussion. To take you through the trajectory of education reform in the state would require a book-length treatise. The highlights: since the mid-aughts the state has vigorously promoted charter schools and instituted a robust voucher program, limited the scope of collective bargaining, tied teacher pay increases to evaluation ratings, and established a turnaround program for schools which underperform over a period of time.

So sitting in the gaming capital of the world, ruminating on the growth of the city and its primary industry, I couldn’t help but think about the comparison to education reform. Has it benefitted the people who schools are built for?

I’ll share the test results for my former school during the decade of the teens:

Source

While our scores in ELA and math decreased significantly during the decade, we closely tracked the decline of schools statewide over the same period.

Not the results anyone had hoped for or anticipated when ed reform was instituted. That’s one school in one city, but the bigger story is the decline in the statewide average scores.

On the positive, there are folks out there looking at school improvement through lenses other than standardized testing. I’m in my second year with the Indiana Department of Education’s Teacher Leader Bootcamp, using University of Chicago research to drive improvement. Of note, the researchers focus on gradebook results for students, in the belief that grades tell a far more complete story of learning than any standardized test ever could.

And my current school is in its second year of a project-based learning conversion as part of the New Tech Network. There are four areas of focus:

Are there folks who’d rather go back and do it the old way? You bet. But I also used to hear from Vegas lifers who told me how much better things were back in the day “when the Mob ran the city”.

I don’t think the corporations that operate the properties that line the Strip would agree. And as long of millions of people visit the city yearly to leave billions of dollars behind, I don’t expect a change. The data support the model.

The jury is still out on education reform in Indiana. The most popular metrics do not appear to justify the changes. But I’m optimistic that as Vegas went through several iterations, the changes in education I find myself in the midst of right now will eventually deliver results as well.

You might even say I’m doubling down on it

Math Marketing 101

Had a chance last week to do some introspection, pondering strengths and weaknesses. Always kind of a loaded question, but one of my strengths is that I know my weaknesses. Or one of them anyway. I’m not the salesman in the family. We need someone convinced to do something, well I’m gonna hand that call off. Packaging tho? I’m not bad. The marketing part of sales I kind of get. I know just enough to be dangerous.

And there’s definitely times I feel like high school math needs better marketing.

Our first quarter ends 0n Thursday. Coincidentally it is also PSAT Week and Homecoming Week. The kind of week that is made to order for a makeup day on the only two regular class days before fall break. (Background on amnesty days here.)

The options for students on Amnesty Day includes quiz corrections, daily work makeups on MathXL, and a playlist of alternate assignments. The idea is for students to display their learning, and to make up the points. But are points enough incentive? Maybe I need a pot sweetener? Something… extra?

I want to give my students different (and ideally, interesting) ways to show their learning of the concepts of the quarter. So I work hard to source or craft a variety of opportunities with various entry points and various levels of complexity and creativity. But on the last regular block before testing, career day, and then taking a week off for fall break, work is not at the top of my students’ list of good times. But every ear perks up at the words “extra credit”.

OK then Mr. Marketer Guy, you want your kids to do your Amnesty Day work? Give it a catchy name. Like “Amnesty Day Extra Credit Playlist”.

The options today:

As a side note, we’ve super-into drag and drop activities as of late. Used this video to learn the basics:

And yeah, I know a drag and drop is basically a DOK 1 e-worksheet. Good as a check for understanding tho.

And in retrospect I’d have added some type of reflection question to the logic form because it didn’t go as deep mathematically maybe as it could have. More of an extension to the Law of Syllogism activity we did a few weeks ago. Also, the actual Barbie Zipline activity is totally worth the two or three days of classtime. It might make an awesome PrBL activity one of these years. (I still have all the materials, and I spent way too much on them to have it all sit in a bag in my basement.)

Another day. But for this day I needed a group of activities to set the hook (as Stevens would say) and get my students engaged on a day when both learning and points were on the table.

I think we accomplished that. I still don’t get 100% participation on Amnesty Days. Extra credit is “extra” by definition. Optional. But I think I get more takers than I would if I just called this “Alternate Assignment Day”. Part of my job is piquing my students’ interest in whatever I’m trying to get them to do, right?

We watch a little too much HGTV in my house, and those real estate people are kind of skilled at marketing notes. So if my mom & dad’s 50’s ranch is now a “mid-century modern” gem, I can call today’s playlist whatever I want.