Tag: statistics

Should I Stay Or Should I Go

I’ve been told by teaching colleagues that I am too analytical. It’s a pretty good read. I’ve never been comfortable flying by the seat of my pants. I’d rather have as much information as I can get and have the pieces more or less in place before making a move.

Although that one Teddy Roosevelt quote hangs behind my desk because sometimes you just have to make a decision.

Source

It’s not always possible to have all the knowledge you need. To be honest, a key moment in my life was when I learned to operate in a grey area, when “black-and-white” is not one of the options.

Did I ever tell you about the time we bought a house sight-unseen? Moving back to the Region from Vegas, we had enough money to fly back for job interviews but not enough to come back a second time for house hunting. We did our research online (on the baby Internet back in 2005), my wife’s stepdad was our agent, we’d find a house, he’d check it out and report back. He eventually did the walkthrough of the house we selected on his flip phone while we stood in the kitchen of our house in Vegas.

Sold. We never saw it in person until we pulled up in the U-Haul.

That’s when I understood the Colin Powell 40-70 rule. General Powell felt if he couldn’t be 40% sure the outcome of a decision, that was a “no”. But he also recognized he would never have 100% of the information, so he set 70% as the threshold. Once he was 70% positive, that was a “go”.

And so it is in so many areas of life. Gather your data, assess the probabilities, move forward. It’s why the probability unit in Algebra II is so rich with opportunities for real-life connections. Yeah, we do do plenty of Fundamental Counting Principle practice, we figure permutations and combinations (“How many ways can three runners finish first, second, and third in the 100-meter dash in a field of eight runners?”)

But the big money payoff is when students see how understanding probabilities and likely outcomes can help them manage an uncertain (at best) world.

We start the prob/stats unit with a deep dive into March Madness, including a bracket challenge with their new-found handicapping knowledge.

Then out of long habit I make the assessment for the unit a pair of activities: First (because Indiana), John Scammell’s “Free Throws For The Win” .

They were like “Mr. Dull can we do something happy tomorrow? Because that was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life!”

We follow that up with an investigation into the Monty Hall Problem (doc here). Both days they do real math and see the real applications of probability that they can start using really as soon as tomorrow.

The big takeaways are that even what seem like highly improbable things still sometimes happen. And that just because something is statistically your best move doesn’t always guarantee success. You have twice the probability of winning the car on Let’s Make A Deal by switching doors, but in any one play (which is all you get when you are a contestant), there is still a 1-in-3 chance you get the Zonk.

Goat 🙂

Weigh your options, and roll.

A lot of my friends in the building are making exactly these mental calculations these days. At our next school board meeting next week the district is expected to announce its decision on school closures and teacher layoffs. Consensus is we will shutter 4 of our 12 elementary schools, and we were told back in November that the defeat of a funding referendum would require cutting 250 teaching positions.

But as a colleague of mine pointed out, folks aren’t waiting. In his words, they are “RIFfing themselves”, lining up new jobs before the axe can fall. In some cases, making the move before the school year is done. We had four resignations from just my building on the personnel report last month, and I suspect the number will be similar this month. (That’s 10 percent of our teaching staff in eight weeks, if you’re scoring at home). And can you blame them? As the famous economist observation goes, when you lose your job, unemployment in your house is 100%. It doesn’t matter what the “official” statistics say.

I’ve been on the other side. Some time ago I left the district I call “the Family Business” for a green leafy suburban school. Well, the grass isn’t always greener. I came back. For the people and the kids. I took a pay cut to do it. There’s no district out there where the hallways are paved with gold. Few are paying significantly more than we are. There are so many districts (even in relatively affluent areas) in financial distress right now, it’s the living embodiment of “the devil you know”. You could jump districts and land someplace worse.

I feel horrible for the families who will have to make plans for their kids to attend a different school next year. For the kids who will leave their friends. I ache for my teacher friends who are going to be forced out of a job they’ve poured their soul into. For the clerical staff and custodians who won’t even be allowed to finish out the year. I’ve been told that due to the number of vacancies and emergency permit folks in the district, teachers with a degree and a license are probably safe. But even for the folks who are above the cut line, the daily anxiety over the future permeating my building is physically exhausting.

And the concessions that will likely be written into our contract (yeah that’s not even settled yet, five months after the state-mandated deadline to conclude negotiations) are frankly petty and punitive and are chasing teachers away. Folks who stay will get no raise and shoulder the burden of an unsustainable insurance premium increase.

Tuesday of Holy Week, this line from the Gospel of John hit hard:

Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I hand the morsel after I have dipped it.” So he dipped the morsel and [took it and] handed it to Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot.  After he took the morsel, Satan entered him. So Jesus said to him, “What you are going to do, do quickly.”

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John%2013:26-28&version=NABRE

That’s all of us right now: whatever the plan is, get on with it. Just tell us. Then we can take that information and make a decision.

Just like they taught us back in Algebra II all those years ago.

Electric Slides

“Hey, Mr. Dull, What’s with all the slides lately?”

Electric Slide GIF
Yeah, not that kind of slide. (Source)

I think I might have mentioned recently that my Algebra II kids are perceptive, but it’s been kind of hard to miss these days. It started with the investigation they did into the math behind their NCAA brackets, then we did a one-day dig into the Monty Hall Problem. There was an Iron Chef day in there somewhere, and this week we rolled out a stats project that was set up in a slide deck.

So yeah, I apparently have a shiny new toy. Sue me.

It’s been a long time coming, actually. The great Katie Bradford first introduced me to hyperdocs at her session at the South Shore e-Learning Conference in Hammond three years ago. Chevin Stone presented blended learning ideas at the same conference.  I knew at the time that this was an ideal lesson design tool that eventually would work its way into my repertoire.

Later I (virtually) met the Hyperdocs Girls through Matt Miller‘s Ditch That Textbook Digital Summit. There’s a book (of course), and a hashtag, and plenty of folks sharing what they do, and an online exchange called “Teachers Give Teachers“. So when I needed templates and ideas, well, no shortage of resources out there.

I’m not as advanced as far as digital design as some other folks. I’m mostly focused on the lesson design aspect right now, making sure I’m asking the right questions, pointing my students to the right resources, and giving them an opportunity to discover, and then to show what they’ve learned. It’s a work in progress, but so far so good.

I’ve been pretty amped about the stats project, so let’s check in for an update:

And the first day was off to a flying start. My kids had a wide range of GSuite readiness, but with proper support from me and each other, they were able to create a Form to ask their survey question, connect it to a Sheet to hold the responses, and add a link to their form to a shared Doc (“The Big List Of Questions”). We spent the remainder of class answering each other’s questions so everyone had data in place for Day Two.

Straight. Fire.

I can’t tell you how psyched they were to open up their spreadsheet and find they had 30, 40, 50 responses to their question. Very few had any experience with Excel, so I gave them a quick walk-through on inserting formulas into a cell so they could display the measures of central tendency and the standard deviation of the data.

I had to be careful to not oversell the next piece. Desmos rolled out a suite of statistics tools this year, including the ability to create a box-and-whisker plot and a histogram. Super-easy and beautiful. I told them it was gonna blow their minds when they saw it.

It was a calculated gamble. More than anything this unit (even more than standard deviation) my students were dreading doing the math and drawing that accompanies making a box-and-whisker plot by hand. I knew that if we let the tech handle the drudge work we could free up brain power to do critical thinking and sense-making. Judging by the looks on their faces when I modeled how to make a list (copy/paste from a spreadsheet!) and then in like 3 clicks have a boxplot ready to be analyzed, I guessed right.

So Day Three is given over to analysis. I’ve got a series of questions set up in a Form, basically the quiz they didn’t think they were going to get. (My DC supports my semi-regular need to try whatever crazy thing shows up in my TL, while serving a check on my students’ need to get concrete practice on skills). I’m holding my breath there. Day Three is a Friday. Their routine has been all kinds of scrambled by SAT Day and state testing the last two weeks. Spring Fever has definitely set in. My students may be disinclined to do Actual Math.

Or they may dazzle me. I’m actually kind of counting on it. That’s the powder keg waiting to blow in a 1:1 environment. We can use their devices as $250 pencils, keep giving them electronic worksheets, or we can use the tools that are out there to help them discover concepts, analyze, and make sense of what they see.

I’ve been sharing some of the baby hyperdocs I’ve made with my tech/instructional coaches, with my Alg II team, and with others in my department who might be receptive. Don’t know if the concept will catch on in my building, but like a lot of things, I’m willing to scatter some seeds and see what happens. Maybe one or two folks ask around. Then, it’s on.

I’ll teach you, teach you, teach you…