Do This and the Bunny Dies

By request Ms Cangialosi:

Because someone's beagles do this all the time ...

Fresh from today's test:

Nominated by @MathsPadJame,

Seriously? Nix The Tricks, Dammit!

I'm trying to hold it together, people ...

We've both had enough of that fraction mistake.

That's not even reasonable ....

One for the younger ones ...

---

Can't remember where I saw this first. (edit: Finally found out the original ones with the handwritten math came from Bowman Dickson, @bowmanimal)

I cleaned up the original images a bit and tried to keep it sensible, but between the kids' and my evil senses of humor ... this project has grown out of control.

We might as well just enjoy it.

Save the Rabbit!

Finally found out these original ones with the handwritten math came from Bowman Dickson, @bowmanimal. You can blame him for starting all this. ;-)

 Poor Kitten ... this happens all the time.

Such a shame how often that poor puppy gets it ...

Damn you, TI !

Because we all know a Fawn ...

Pandas are endangered, people. Cut that out!
from http://www.paulmcdonogh.com

Poor, poor Grumpy Cat.

Don't make him cry, people!

You heartless bastards.

I have nothing left to say.

Do You REALLY want him to win?

There's more!

Look at how sad he is ...

Don't you want friends ....

Poor bastard ...

SO very disappointed ...

It's just mean for you to do this ...

This just makes me sad ...

Do This All .ppt

 Do This All .pdf

More PBE Idiocy

My school is implementing Proficiency - Based education this year. (Some people call it Standards-Based Grading)

We're behind the curve; the State of Vermont has decreed that ALL schools in Vermont will be using PBE so that the Class of 2020 will have had four years of PBE by the time they graduate. That's this year's sophomores.

Yes, that means we're a year behind. Our school's faculty made the decision last May to push forward with this initiative against the wishes of the SU -- we didn't want to wait two more years to begin, putting us three years late according to the directive from the State.

Our reasoning was that, if this is truly a Good Thing, then why should we wait to put it into place?

But our supervisory office and it's IT staff are hopelessly unready. Incompetent isn't a unfair characterization. They have no transcript format ready to go, no sense of how to ascertain academic ineligibility, etc.

So we faculty are doing it for them and fighting against their bad decisions the whole time.

Faculty: "Don't average proficiencies. In fact, don't even think of them as percentages."

"Hold my beer," they said.

Faculty: "Wait, you shouldn't do that ... and what's with the gaps between the levels? .... and what's with 'Not Attempted' being 0% to 15%?"

SU: "Uh, we don't know, and we don't know how to change it."
Faculty: "If you insist we keep percentages AND that they must average, would you at least fix the gaps?"

SU: "Uh, we don't know how to change it."
SU: "Uh, leadership team needs to make that decision."
SU: "Uh, it's your fault for moving too quickly."

Faculty: sigh.

SU: "Uh, you know there's two different scales, right?"

Faculty: "Wait, what? That's ridiculous, and wrong on so many levels. No one would do anything that stupid."

SU: "Yeah, check this out. Hold my beer."

Faculty: "Okay, so the percentages are the same but why is it called Approaching in this scale and 'Nearly' in the other?"

SU: "We thought it would be fun to change it two days before school starts, but not everywhere. You'll randomly see one or the other."

Faculty: "Whaaaat?"

Faculty: "By the way, if I enter a 3 out of 4, I get an NP. It should be Four Levels means One thru Four, but it isn't working that way. Please explain that."

SU: "Uh, we don't know what you're talking about and we don't know how to change it."
SU: "But, we just figured out that if you use a 5-point scale, and enter a 4 out of 5, then you'll get proficient. Think of it as a feature."

Faculty: "You went out of your way and insisting that it was four levels, not five. Would you please get it straight?"

SU: "BTW, did we mention there's a third scale? Check this out!"

Faculty: "WTF is with those percentages changes?"
Faculty: "If I enter a 3 out of 4, I get an NP again. Please explain that. While you're at it, why is 'Emerging' now 0%-50% instead of the 15%-45%?"

SU: "Uh, we don't know what you're talking about and we don't know how to change it, but all three are active in your gradebook at the same time."

Faculty" "Are you serious?" 

SU: "Yep. We're kinda proud of all the work we've done."

Faculty: "It's been all different, the kids and parents are fuming, and we're going back over everything and rescoring everything to make things consistent. THIS HAS NOT BEEN HELPFUL."

SU: "Don't be ungrateful ... BTW, you know how you asked that all of the Common Core State Standards for math be put into the gradebook?"

Faculty: "(Nervously) Um, yeah?"

SU: "We changed the names of each one of them."

Faculty: "Keep your goddamn beer."

Don't Average Proficieny-Based Grades

Either you are proficient or you are not proficient.

You can pretend to other "Levels" but that is the crux of standards-based education, or Proficiency-Based Education as it has been recently renamed.

What you can't do is assign a percentage to each level, then average them to get an average proficiency, then average the proficiencies to get a final score.

How is "Nearly Proficient = 70%" even valid? Right, it isn't, but in the exciting world of education, there's a difference between what the state of Vermont mandated and what our school is doing and what the superintendent and the district chief IT person seem willing to support.

So we get to start the year with everyone up in our shit over Proficient being a 75% ... and instead of eliminating the percentages, they changed it to 80% hoping that parents and students would shut up and return to their homes.

Can we turn off percents already?

Open Mouth, Insert Foot

It's nearly time for graduation and you know what that means ... more bitching about grades and discipline and willful teenagers being allowed to walk with their class (or not). It's also time for everyone to comment on what the seniors are wearing beneath their robes. 

Did I say "seniors"? I meant "female seniors" because the boys wear a dark color and the girls wear white ... a white robe made of cheap satin and quite translucent. When a boy wears a black Batman t-shirt, no one can tell. If a girl wears anything other than a plain white t-shirt, the colors show right through. It's like that girl at the right wearing a blue striped shirt. If she dares to wear a colorful bra that shows around the straps of her halter top under the robe ... well, "That just won't do."

That's right, an all-covering robe isn't enough. If admin can see the bra strap or the pink Hello Kitty t-shirt through the cheap-ass fabric ... go change. Instead of simply ordering a better robe or letting the seniors choose which color to wear, admin decides to change tradition because of colored t-shirts.

"All seniors in the dark color."

By The Way, they forgot to mention this to the school board, community, parents, and until recently, the seniors themselves.

Now, I'm still okay with things at this point. Elegant solution to discrimination, clothing and dress code issues, blah, blah, blah. Those cheap white robes were terrible. If this had stopped there, I wouldn't be complaining, and neither would most everyone else.

White robes too clear = everyone go in dark color. Nobody would have given a damn.

See? Easy.

HOWEVER, when you are in a conservative and still very hide-bound and occasionally discriminatory school district, and are considering making a change to a long-time tradition such as the color of the graduation robes (decades-old tradition), the very last thing you should do as an admin is remark that it will also help you with the LBGT kids problem.

God dammit.

Now, instead of a simple sartorial decision, everyone starts looking around for someone to bitch at and about ... and so they did. Some blame the LGBT kids for forcing a change (they didn't); the old assholes are talking about how those damn LGBTs are so entitled (they aren't); how there's something wrong with them anyway; why can't they just accept the color we've chosen for them and be happy about it; we're not even comfortable with them in the ceremony anyway. Other seniors are adding to the pressure. You'd think the color white was more important than the diploma and we were still in the 1960s.


Sheesh.

When are we gonna learn?

Not sure this is a "Majority"

from the Daily Buzz, not known for its math skills, comes this paragraph ...

Noel Biderman, CEO of Avid Life Media which owns Ashley Madison, claimed that the site had equal opportunity connections for men and women, but in fact, the site’s members were primarily men by a staggering ratio of 28 million men to 5 million women.

Surprisingly, a majority of the email addresses on the site, 15,000 of them, were linked to men who are U.S. government and/or military officials.

15,000 out of 33 million?

Is this like a moral majority?

If that's a condition, I want nothing to do with it.

In a discussion the other day with one of the new teachers in the district, I mentioned that I was the NHS advisor, and that I was surprised that the dues for the school's joining for the year went from $85 to $385 per year. That got a strange look and a negative comment about the organization; I'm paraphrasing here: "I hate the NHS."

One raised eyebrow later, the teacher continued, "I was straight As, honor roll, did everything they expected of new members, the works. I and a couple of friends were rejected because our parents were divorced. Yep. The kids who were accepted all had married parents. Everyone rejected had divorced parents.  When we asked the advisor about it, he talked about the morality clause."

Unbelievable.

Data Point #934 Showing Why Teacher Education is Problematic

I was perusing the blog feed and I come across my favorite source for "interesting" teacher education issues. Okay, most of what he writes seems flawed, but at least he's advocating to "Burn The Textbooks, Shred The Worksheets, Teach Math", but I digress.

Click to enlarge that image.

It's measures of central tendency from a stack of pennies. How far down the list of values can you get before you reach an inconsistency in the numbers?

How is this a sample of what you, as a real math teacher, would want to show the world as exemplar of your students' work? Why would this page be the one that you put out to the world ... unless you were deliberately showing how you gave feedback, a la @mpersham's mathmistakes.org.

The project itself is a fine one ... I did the same thing when learning to use Fathom, and I plan on using it with my class this year.  But, really, if showing teachers "cool" or useful projects, wouldn't you want to display ones that are at least mostly (>50%) correct?

While this page would be great to show the relationship between sample statistics and population statistics, it's not at all clear to me whether our blogger noticed any of the problems.

Here is the population, if anyone is interested:

The Highly Ineffective Principal: Clerical Error

A certain principal writes a letter for the school yearbook.  In his message, Roosevelt Principal Dr. Steven Strachan tells the graduates how proud he is of them and that they are a class of “great leaders, articulate orators, brilliant scientists, breathtaking athletes and extraordinary artists.”

He plagiarized the message.

Word for word. All of it.

From a principal in CA, uncredited.

But, but, but, but ... he "asked permission to quote"!

Here's the best part:

"I sincerely apologize to the Roosevelt community and to the class of 2014 for the inadvertent clerical error causing mistakes to be printed in the 2014 yearbook. An unedited draft of my remarks was accidentally published rather than the final version, and I take full responsibility for the oversight."

 Clerical error? A clerical error is misspelling the name of the guy you're quoting, or writing that the year is 2041. A clerical error is the yearbook editor rearranging the paragraphs inadvertently. A clerical error does not include you plagiarizing the entire message from another principal and then congratulating the WRONG SENIOR CLASS at the WRONG SCHOOL.

The Roosevelt principal even concluded his message like Barone did, writing, “Congratulations to the Albany High School Class of 2013.”

Blaming your plagiarism on the yearbook editor's "clerical error" is low-class, especially when you phrase it "clerical error causing mistakes to be printed." Passive voice apology fuck-you?

My favorite part of this is that he takes "full responsibility for the oversight." If one of his students did that, suspension would be in order. Nothing is happening to him ... he doesn't even have to pay the piddling amount of money for the reprint: the last line of the piece mentions that the pages are being reprinted with $800 from the "Principal's Discretionary Fund."

In case you're not familiar with public school budgetary BS, that's a slush fund that the principal may use at his discretion. Usually, it's used for things like buying a poor senior her cap and gown, or funding some low-income students tickets to a show that other kids are going to. Maybe supplying the SpecialEd department with some bit of tech that they can't get under normal budgets. Feel-good stuff or charitable-type things.

Educator of the Year.

Seriously, wordpandit?

It makes me cry because it's not a typo.

Here's a sample of the quality of their proofreading.

 Seriously, http://wordpandit.com?

More Fun with the School Internet Filter

Looked over the shoulder of a student in the computer room: VPR.net was blocked. That's Vermont Public Radio, by the way.  I commented on how silly it was to block that when I had a thought and asked the kid to check Foxnews.com. Open.

And this is a liberal state!

Score:
Vermont Public Radio: 0
FOXNews.com: 1

Math Literacy - It's not just for breakfast, you know.

The stat of the day ...

OCTOBER 17, 2012

Don't Believe People Who Say They Work 60 Hours a Week

That's very interesting.

People overstate the number of weekly hours they "usually" work by 5% to 10%, with those on the higher end being more likely to overestimate, according to a study led by John P. Robinson of the University of Maryland. By examining U.S. workers' time diaries, the researchers found that people who say they usually work 55 to 64 hours per week are off by an average of about 10 hours; people who say they work 65 to 74 hours are overstating by about 20 hours. Respondents may inflate their estimates because of a desire to appear industrious, the researchers suggest.

Okay. Listen up.
If you're going to have a blog called Stat of the Day, you need to adhere to some basic rules.

1. Don't make stupid math errors.
2. Don't quote stupid research.

• If a person claimed 55 to 64 hours and is off by 10 hours, then they worked 45 to 54 hours. 
• If a person claimed 65 to 74 hours and is off by 20 hours, then they worked 45 to 54 hours. 

These two statements should not be separate - people only work 45 to 54 hours, regardless of what they claim.

•  Overestimating by 5% to 10% on 45 to 54 hours of real work does not make you 10 hours off in your estimate.

Sheesh.

Credit Recovery or Fraud?

From Joanne Jacobs:
Three Los Angeles seniors who failed a required class, were able to transfer to a credit-recovery school for two days, pass and return to graduate with classmates, reports the Los Angeles Times. Teachers are annoyed.

The students withdrew from STEM Academy of Hollywood as late as June 13, a Wednesday, attended the adjacent Alonzo Community Day School the next day, and checked back into STEM to graduate that Friday.

Teachers are annoyed indeed.

It makes you wonder a lot of things: the idea that the other school was "adjacent", the idea that you can "drop out" with two days to go, the idea that the second school's standards are so low that the kids failing at school #1 can take a few quizzes and tests in 2 days and pass and then re-enroll in time to graduate, and the idea that STEM "has" to accept the credits.

 Alonzo, the alternative school, is intended for students who are at risk of dropping out. Although it has a traditional school day, it measures credits only by work completed, not the time the students spend in class, said Principal Victorio R. Gutierrez.

How about growing some cajones and refusing to let them re-enroll?  It's obvious to all but the most insufferable twit that they are gaming the system.  At least delay the acceptance of the credits until after some paperwork has been done -- just long enough to keep them from walking with the rest.

Time off for good behavior?

New York City school employee faked her child's death to get extra vacation.


Wow.

"Joan Barnett, a parent coordinator at the Manhattan High School of Hospitality Management, was so determined to make the spring break jaunt that she:
* Had one of her daughters call the school to say that her sister had suffered a heart attack in Costa Rica.
* Had another daughter call the school later that day to say that the sister had died and that about a dozen relatives, including Barnett, were traveling to the country for a funeral.
* Faxed a forged death certificate of her daughter “Xinia Daley Herman” to school as proof of the death. The document is required if a city school employee asks for bereavement days.

I can't even imagine the thought process that didn't go into this idea.

Differentiation

I can follow you but
I have no idea why you're so stupid.

I'm just being snarky ...

If we're supposed to differentiate our teaching to each student in the class, why can't Guidance schedule it so that each student in each class is roughly similar.  I know that every kid is an individual and all that, but after 20-something years of teaching I've realized that they fall into groups pretty easily.

Second, if everything is so individualized and shit, why does our administration keep demanding lesson plans - shouldn't we be more flexible than that? I mean, having just ONE plan?

Finally, if that differentiation is really different, how is it that the first two things at Inservice are:

"We've got to eliminate the bell curve. There is no bell curve. We need to flatten the bell curve." and "All kids are proficient. We just have to find it."

If there's no bell curve, then why do we need to get rid of it? If we don't have one, what is the purpose of differentiating our teaching? 

What the hell does "Flatten the bell curve mean? Do we want to have equal numbers at each ability level instead of all the students at the proficient one? 

I was able to understand what incorrect psychobabble he was trying to say even though he was too stupid and confused to actually rise to that level. But all people are equal and we've got to differentiate even in Professional Development, don't we?

"I know you believe you understand what it is you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what I said is not what I meant. " ~ President Richard M. Nixon to the International Press Corps

Going over to the snark side.

I have a dark side. I can't help but make fun of those unfortunate education professors and trainers who can't seem to get math right. My Google reader even has a section called "math morons" loaded with idiots of the EduProf persuasion.

Here's today's entry, which, on the face of it, might be a clever way to review until you realize how crappy this shirt is.

"Using T-shirts To Teach Math Properties by Jeremiah Dyke (Be sure to ask your local stores for donations)"

Now look at the picture a little more closely ....

"Communative?" Is that a word?  "Order of # doesn't matter." Really? Are there any restrictions you want to place on that? "Associative - Grouping doesn't matter."  Shudder. Only in specific situations. "Distributive - Use the even to each."  What does this even mean?

I don't wonder why our new teachers suck at math. I wonder why they pay him to instruct them.

"Throw away your textbook," the man says.

Sure sign you're teaching in Vermont.

"Hey, Mr. Curmudgeon.  I won't be in on Thurday or Friday.  My family is going hunting.  I'm hoping to get a moose."

Teacher Training?

"Mr. C, I want to be teacher."
Then your entrance exam is to decode this.  If you can make sense of this, you are ready to be a teacher.

h/t to Pissed Off!

Stupid, just Stupid.

Business Insider has a Chart-of-the-Day that I subscribe to.  It's usually bland and stupid, some line chart or pie chart, but occasionally the editors commit some total bonehead move and choose the wrong type of graph or mess up somehow. Equally rarely, they produce a wonderful one, with some really cool data.  I use it to let my students see that their choices and mistakes are not uncommon but that you risk looking silly if you misuse Excel.

The page has links to other business-related stuff, which is why I brought it up.  Here is an amazing picture-story combination.  Any thoughts?

In the running for HIP

"A third-grader in a small Texas school district received a week's detention for merely possessing a Jolly Rancher. Leighann Adair, 10, was eating lunch Monday when a teacher confiscated the candy. Her parents said she was in tears when she arrived home later that afternoon and handed them the detention notice. But school officials are defending the sentence, saying the school was abiding by a state guideline that banned 'minimal nutrition' foods. 'Whether or not I agree with the guidelines, we have to follow the rules,' said school superintendent Jack Ellis."

Because you're an idiot?

Not all percussionists are talented

Some are built.