In all seriousness… there comes a point where we kinda stop “celebrating” these things.

But here is one of the more amusing things students have made me, from back in Season 5:1

…which went along with this cake:

1. 2011-12 [↩]

After the first two days back from Spring Break,1 this is how I feel:

To clarify, I feel like Sonny Liston (the dude lying on his back, looking up at Muhammad Ali).

But at least we managed to keep the ship moving forward.

1. you know, the one that I think should be two weeks long instead of one. [↩]

Well. Spring Break is over.1

No teacher is ready for work tomorrow.2

Almost seven months into the season, and the stretch run is upon us.

In two Fridays, we will be finished with the textbook for AP Stat.3

The AP Exam4 is in nine eight (on May 9).

Three Fridays after that we conclude Spring Finals.5

The end of this tunnel is just around the corner…

1. and I still think it ought to be 2 weeks, not one [↩]
2. and if they tell you that they are, they’re lying [↩]
3. Which, by the way, in my first year of teaching Stat in 2010-11, was the most triumphant moment of the year. Actually I think that may have been the most triumphant moment of all 7+ years to date. I do not miss having to spend 6-10 hours of prep every Saturday for that entire first year… [↩]
4. a.k.a., “Game Day” or “Glory” [↩]
5. a.k.a., “Glory, the sequel” [↩]

NOTE: After changing locations in 2014, the passing periods at my school are no longer 6 minutes — but rather 8. After briefly changing the title of my blog to reflect this, I decided that the title “six minutes of separation” just had a nicer “ring” — and also, the original title was a play on the phrase “six degrees of separation — so I changed it back. This post was written when I worked at a school at which they were six.

In case you’re curious about the significance of the time denomination in the sub-title of this blog, there’s a very simple explanation:

Six minutes is the length of the passing periods at our high school.

If you’re unfamiliar with the way schools generally work: This is the amount of time that students have in between classes to get from one locale to the next.1 2

That’s if you’re a student.

For us teachers, six minutes is all the separation that we get to catch our breath and collect ourselves.

Rough morning class push you to the verge of breaking down in tears? 3 Take six minutes, buck up, and head back out to the battlefield!

Six minutes is also all we get to run to the restroom in between classes.4

Up until a couple of years ago, the passing periods used to be 7 minutes (and there would be a “warning” bell at the 6 minute mark), but when the current leadership team took over in 2011, one of the first changes they made was shortening the passing periods to 5 minutes.

The reaction? Think: New Coke, 1985.5

About a month or so into the campaign, the admin team kindly gave us back a minute, to make it an even 6. 6

Back in the days of “seven minutes of separation”, I used to be able to make it down to the teacher’s lounge, brew up a new pot of coffee, fill up my coffee mug, and make it back to my class in time for the tardy bell — all without breaking a leisurely stride. When the passing periods were shortened to 5 minutes7, this was no longer possible. 8

That’s when I decided that I needed to invest in one of these:

I also have a microwave9 now to complement the coffee maker10 but NOT a refrigerator.11

1. Of course, most kids spend about 5 minutes and 59 seconds socializing before making any attempt to get to their next class. #sadlife [↩]
2. Our school is rather large, and this is not always a lot of time! [↩]
3. Well, I mean, I’m a guy, so I don’t cry, of course, but… yeah. [↩]
4. Not being able to use the restroom at one’s convenience may seriously be one of the biggest adjustments a grown-up has to make upon entering the world of teaching. Given that our classes are 90 minutes in length, we only have a couple of legitimate opportunities each day to allow nature to call. Because of this, I’ve had to exercise discretion when making decisions about what, when, and how much to eat for both breakfast and lunch. Seriously. [↩]
5. You know… rioting, strikes, objects being thrown through windows in protest… okay NOT really. But Will M’s humorous skit at Mr. Mav that year played this theme out as such =) [↩]
6. I wonder… if they changed the length of our passing periods again, would I rename this blog? Hmmmm…. [↩]
7. and even later when they were amended to 6 [↩]
8. My old classroom in upper-C was on the opposite corner of our large campus from the teacher’s lounge. Of course, now that I’m in a different location, perhaps a coffee run might be possible… [↩]
9. which is not a very great microwave, truth be told [↩]
10. which is not a very great coffee maker [↩]
11. I considered it once, but thought: At that point, why not just wave the white flag, surrender any semblance of a social life, bring in a sleeping bag, and just live at school? No, a fridge would be an over-the-line form of surrender, I concluded. [↩]

I do NOT think that a one-week Spring Break is long enough.1

I discovered very early on in my teaching career that Spring Break is WAYYYY tougher to come back from than Winter Break. It’s been that way for me every year since Season Zero2 and I expect this year3 will be no different.

Breakdown:

WINTER BREAK (2 weeks): Long enough to crash, hit rock bottom… and then bounce back. By the end of the two weeks, you’re ready4 to get back to work.

SPRING BREAK (1 week): Just long enough to crash and hit rock bottom. Before you have a chance to bounce back, you are simultaneously teaching 1st period on Monday morning and feeling like roadkill.5

Coming back after exactly one week off is like waking up a slumbering bear in the middle of its hibernation — scientifically, not sound; practically, just a bad idea. 6

Last Friday before the break,7 we finally broke these out:

I’ve actually had these for a couple of years but this is the first year that I managed to find the opportunity to use them. Sadly, only the 13 B-day students who showed up to school that day8 got to experience them.

Here’s the idea:

Each student performs the 9-step walk-and-turn field sobriety test9 twice — once “sober”10 and then again while “intoxicated”.1112 They do this along a piece of blue tape that I lay out on the floor down the center aisle of our classroom. They have to step heel-to-toe without wobbling or stumbling or using their arms to balance. The rest of the class counts the number of “infractions” each student makes, and then we use the data to perform an inference procedure or two.

Which is all great and fun, but… I quickly discovered that if you give these kids some drunk goggles and a little free time on a Friday afternoon, you’d be amazed at what they come up with.13

1. Well, either that, or it is TOO long… I’m gonna go with the former. [↩]
2. I refer to 2006-07 — my first year of teaching — as “Season 0” since I started in the middle of that school year. [↩]
3. Season Seven, by the same numbering scheme. [↩]
4. Even if most of us refuse to admit it [↩]
5. So perhaps one could call it a “dead cat bounce” [↩]
6. Here’s a pic for the footnotes that I couldn’t otherwise fit above: [↩]
7. a.k.a., “senior skip day” [↩]
8. that’s 13 students in 2 Stat classes… combined. That’s 13 out of 60 B-day AP Stat students on the roster. [↩]
9. more info available here, if you’re curious [↩]
10. Without the goggles [↩]
11. Wearing the goggles. By the way, it is actually VERY difficult to walk in a straight line with these things on. They’re no joke. The kids made me try, and let’s just say… it was a lot of fun. [↩]
12. Incidentally… upon donning the goggles, one student immediately exclaimed, “No. This is NOT an accurate representation”… which worries me. [↩]
13. “Drunk hopscotch”, “drunk patty-cake”, “drunk shadow-boxing”, and “drunk racing around the halls” are a few things that they might hypothetically come up with… just saying. [↩]

While I rarely employ curves on exams in “traditional” math classes, Statistics is a very special beast. And in AP Stat, I’ve explored a variety of flavors, including (but not limited to):

• Gaussian curve (a.k.a., “bell curve”)
• Shift by a constant (i.e., add 5 points to each score)
• Add 5% or 10% of current HW average to each test score1
• The “eBay curve”2
• Square root curve3
• The “20% discount”4 and its close relative, the “25% discount”
• …and my personal favorite: the “you get exactly the score that you earned” curve. In other words: NO CURVE.5

The fact that I’m blogging about curves the day that I graded our 2nd major exam over statistical inference?

Total coincidence, of course.

1. The idea being: reward students for practice / effort. Sure, we can debate the merits of this one… [↩]
2. Think: different rules for calculating fees based on the price range of the product. Basically a piecewise function of sorts… [↩]
3. This one doesn’t make much sense to me if I think about it too long… [↩]
4. Students “get back” 20% of the points they missed. I believe a student once referred to this as a “Communist curve”… lol [↩]
5. Yeah, this one is definitely NOT a crowd favorite among students. [↩]