For the past three years, I have been fortunate enough to have full control over the AP Statistics program at our school.

This came with a lot of perks, as I got to control the pace, schedule, assignments, and assessments.

If I wanted to make a last-minute adjustment that I thought was in the best interest of the students, I could do so without consulting anyone.

But one of the biggest perks of having full control over what you teach — in my opinion, at least — is something you’d probably not consider immediately:

I get to decide what fonts to use.

Yes, I care about font control.

Hey, scoff not. After all, why does one bother dressing up fancy for a job interview? Because the way that one presents themselves — both in terms of aesthetics and in substance — matters. Presentation matters.

It makes me cringe when I see a PowerPoint dressed in Calibri… or Cambria… or — Heaven forbid — Comic Sans.1 I would classify these as “MOST OFFENSIVE”.

“MILDLY OFFENSIVE” would be Times New Roman or Arial.2

One of these days, I am going to be working with a team of wonderful teachers who will come up with a wonderful assessment for us to give to our students, and it will be written in Times New Roman, and when that happens, a small part of me is going to cry.

Back in 2010 when I started teaching Statistics, my predecessor and mentor, Cathy Morgan was particular3 about her fonts. While she used a lot of Comic Sans (gasp), she did introduce me to another gem of a font:

CREEPY.

I like using this one when warning students about watching out for classic traps… or to remind them to SHOW THEIR WORK — BUT ONLY IF THEY WANT CREDIT!

Call it what you like… but it has its moments.

Earlier today, I managed a peek at next year’s AP Exam schedule. It appears that our AP Exam will NOT be on Friday afternoon next year4 — we’re back to the 2nd Wednesday5 while Calculus interestingly gets bumped up a day to Tuesday.

1. While I coded the html/css of this post to use the actual fonts, I realize that iOS does not have Comic Sans installed, so while I meant for this to be in Comic Sans, it might not actually render in Comic Sans on your mobile device. And that might not be a bad thing. [↩]
2. In the past I would put “Helvetica” in this category, but thanks in part to Apple with iOS7, Helvetica is currently trendy… [↩]
3. and peculiar… [↩]
4. Good riddance! Although, truthfully, in spite of my complaints, ending the week with the AP Exam had its perks. [↩]
5. and I’m not exactly overjoyed of being knocked back into the 2nd week [↩]

I have always considered myself to be of a unique generation that got to experience life on both sides of the internet revolution.

Allow me to share a few examples:

When I was in the fifth grade and had to write book reports, I used a typewriter.

Yes, a typewriter. The kind that you had to feed a ribbon1 and hit “return” and THEN do a carriage return. 2 Cut-and-paste literally meant using scissors, glue, and a copy machine.

When I was a freshman in high school, my family got our first real computer: A 486 DX, 33 megahertz. Windows 3.0. 640×480 resolution monitor with 16 colors. Less than 30 MB of hard drive space. That’s when we started using Microsoft Word to type out school papers. As in: “Holy cow! You mean I can change the word “there” to “they’re” WITHOUT having to toss the paper out and start all over?!”

Back then, if you liked a song that you heard on the radio, you would keep a blank cassette in the stereo and frantically reach for the “RECORD” button as soon as that song came on again. Thus the first 5 seconds of any of your favorite songs was the stuff of unicorns.

This was before internet.

That’s right. This was WAYYYYY before Facebook and Twitter, AOL instant messenger, and about a million other things that I would’ve given a leg and half-an-arm for back in 1993.

Back then, the only way for a teenager in Texas to keep in touch with old friends in California was:

1. Land-line phone calls.3 If you were smart enough to wait until after 7pm to make a phone call, it only cost 15 cents a minute.4 If you were dumb enough to call out-of-state during the daytime,5 it would set you back 24 cents a minute. 6
2. Write a letter. On paper. Fold it up, put in an envelope, and stick a 29 cent postage stamp on it. By the way, that’s 29 cents if the letter is no more than 1 ounce. If you sent a letter that contained pictures (or had more than 4 sheets of paper), it would cost another 23 cents for each additional ounce.7 Oh, and then wait anywhere from two days to a week for delivery.
3. Fly back to California. Thankfully, we had airplanes back then. Seeing as how we didn’t have Carl’s Jr. and In-N-Out in Texas until just recently, this was my favorite option (of course, for other reasons as well, aside from just the food).

Towards the end of my senior year of high school, my friends started hearing of this really interesting thing that allowed people to use their computers to communicate with their friends and family. It was called e-mail.

Then when I got to college, the internet pretty much boomed into existence, and the rest was history.8 If you ever wonder why stuff like Facebook is so fascinating to older folks, it’s because stuff like Facebook is actually amazing to them.

FYI: I have never used a slide-rule. I think I’ve seen one, though. Also: I did not use an abacus to do math in elementary school, although I recall my dad once trying to show me how to do multiplication on it (don’t even ask, I don’t remember how).

Of course, I thought of all this while trying to figure out if I had enough TI-84 graphing calculators for my students taking the AP Statistics exam on Friday. Which leads me to one last touch down memory lane. I’m just gonna let xkcd #768 do the talking:

1. there was also a “white-out” ribbon on the snazzier models, which could be used to “delete” a typo [↩]
2. It befuddles me that in some programming contexts, we still have a distinction between “line breaks” and “carriage returns”, as few people nowadays actually know the difference. [↩]
3. cell phones existed, but were not ubiquitous among non-business users until around 5 years later [↩]
4. Yes. Please, do the math. One of the things I knew cold as a teenager in the 90’s was that a one-hour phone call would cost my parents $9, and that a 3 hour phone call would earn me a stern discussion at the dinner table. [↩]
5. which includes weekdays during Summer vacay! [↩]
6. But you wanna know something totally wacky? It actually cost more to call somebody 40 miles away in the same state, than it did to call 1400 miles away, out of state. For instance, a phone call from Orange County, CA to Los Angeles might cost 30 or 40 cents a minute. I bet the phone companies are ticked that cell phones were ever invented… oh wait, they’re still ripping us off… [↩]
7. As a math teacher, I’m sure I could make a piecewise function problem out of that… [↩]
8. The internet actually allowed me to learn basic Japanese so that I could play Final Fantasy 5, which at the time was only released in Japan… that’s a whole other story. [↩]

In previous years, I have felt like a moody, hormonal, pregnant bovine1 in the days leading up to the AP exam.

The following is a list of thoughts that have actually gone through my head at this point in previous campaigns:

• “Do all of my calculators have fresh batteries?”2
• “What if the box of AP exams catches on fire? There go the last 10 months of my hard work…”3
• “Why aren’t more students showing up to ask questions during tutorials?!? They don’t ALL know EVERYHING…”4
• “What if the AP exams get lost in transit on the way back to College Board? There go the last 10 months of my life…”5
• “Why does senioritis have to be an actual thing? Can’t some biotech company come up with a free cure that would eradicate it forever?”6
• “If my students don’t do well on the exam, my superiors are going to regret ever trusting me to teach the class…”
• “I really hope they don’t put a question on the free-response over that one thing that I wish I had spent more time on…”7
• “What if a student does something idiotic in the testing room and gets everyone’s score cancelled?8 There goes the last year of my life…“
• “I can’t wait until the AP exam is over… then I can go back to feeling like a normal living human being. Then I’ll be able to sleep at night again.”9

Truth be told, now that it’s my 4th rodeo, I am feeling almost none of the above thoughts this time around. I do NOT feel like a zombie. Nor do I feel like a pregnant cow. 10 I can sleep at night, and I remember the taste of food.11

On the first day of class, when I ask students if “99” is a “good number” to them and to introduce themselves and explain why, the overarching theme is that a single number by itself is almost meaningless. Last year, I had to allow myself to be reminded that such is true with AP exam scores: At the end of all days, it is just another number.12

Curious to know what some teenagers are going through this week?13 I actually have a handful of students that are currently running the following gauntlet:

• AP Chemistry Exam, Monday morning
• AP Calculus Exam, Wednesday morning
• AP English Lit,14 Thursday morning OR AP English Language,15 Friday morning
• AP Statistics, Friday afternoon161718
• AP Physics, Monday afternoon19

1. a.k.a., a cow. Yes, a moo-cow. [↩]
2. I check out some of my yellow class TI-84’s on exam day, as not all of my students have one — and you really want an 84, not an 83 in Stat. [↩]
3. Seriously. Back in Season 5 — May 2012 — I was scared to death that something crazy like this might occur and totally ruin my life. I can readily admit: the exam meant too much to me that year. [↩]
4. Though some would see this as a blessing. I’m sure it’s because I’m such an awesome teacher that nobody has any questions. Mmmmmm hmm. No, that’s not it. [↩]
5. Again, the kind of thing that was going through my head in 2012. [↩]
6. Sigh. One can dream. Except for the “free” part. That one word puts this item in “neeeeeeeeeeeeeeveeeer gonna happen” territory. [↩]
7. Last year, that one thing was simulations. Made special worksheets and activities for it… but decided not to do them. Thought we’d be okay without. Hate to be on the wrong side of prophetic, but… that came back to bite us a little. [↩]
8. To this end, we actually used to collect every students’ cell phone on the morning of the exam and return them afterwards… but now that almost everyone has a $600 smartphone, this becomes difficult from a practicality standpoint. [↩]
9. Because, again, I feel like a zombified pregnant mummy-moo-cow at this time of the year. Incidentally I wanted to find a picture of a zombie-cow for this post, but… no dice just kidding – found one! [↩]
10. Though with the new nearby Whole Foods and their self-serve barbecue… [↩]
11. You know, “Lord of the Rings: Return of the King”, that scene where Sam and Frodo are on the rock right before Sam carries Frodo and the ring gets destroyed… [↩]
12. No, I am not saying I don’t care about how my students do on the AP exam. I do care. But I also think that most students benefit more from getting a year of exposure to statistics while in high school before heading out to college than from just a single score on an exam. On the other hand, if a student makes a 3 or 4 on the exam and thus NEVER has to take another math class for as long as they live… well that’s a pretty sweet deal as well. [↩]
13. #1stworldproblems, I know. [↩]
14. for seniors [↩]
15. for juniors [↩]
16. Yes, this means my 11th graders are taking BACK-TO-BACK AP EXAMS. Or, as they like to put it, 7 hours of writing exams. Oh by the way, the Statistics AP Exam is much more writing than it is math. [↩]
17. Have I mentioned how much I LOVE having our AP exam on Friday afternoon? If you’re not a teacher, let me impart this piece of wisdom upon you: Friday afternoon is the worst possible time to schedule a major exam of any type. [↩]
18. I actually had a student suggest that we just order pizza and throw a post-AP-exam party in my classroom on Friday evening. lol [↩]
19. this is the following Monday, just FYI. [↩]