Today at around 4pm, the announcement came over the intercom that the district agreed to extend the end of the six weeks by a week.

Simultaneously, I heard a faint chorus of angels singing “Hallelujah”.

Now instead of frantically trying to figure out how to make up for 3 ice days between now and Valentine’s Day,12 we now have until the end of next week to fit in our 2nd major exam of the six weeks. 3

While it was great to finally catch a break, in a way it’s analogous to raising the debt ceiling4 — great in the interim, but something that we will have to “pay back” eventually. By that, I mean:

1. Spring Break still begins on March 7, and…
2. the Statistics AP Exam is still May 9.

It’s not like either of those “hard deadlines” is getting pushed back.

This morning when it became obvious that school would start 2 hours late today,5 I was fearing that I would have to toss two of my favorite activities overboard: Globe-tossing and flying frogs,6 but it looks as though I’ll at least be able to save the latter.

1. which is, by the way, in 3 calendar days. In other words: Impossible. [↩]
2. also something which, by the way, I had to explain to students is something that I do not celebrate -_- [↩]
3. If you’re not familiar with “the system” and are wondering why we need to fit in 2 major exams each six weeks, that is a whole other discussion that perhaps I’ll tackle another day. [↩]
4. oh did that happen today? [↩]
5. which made it 3-and-a-half “A-days” in 3 weeks [↩]
6. which, by the way, would really really suck — let’s face it, any student remembers those activities a lot longer than any textbook concept. [↩]

Classes cancelled AGAIN tomorrow. 1

Once again, it’s an A-day.

Which, by the way, if you’re currently in my AP Stat, you may want to read this. (Warning: if you’re in 1st or 3rd, you’re not going to like it)

1. I think this is a record. [↩]

Tomorrow morning, our district is starting 2 hours late as a precautionary measure due to freezing weather.

Even though there is zero chance of precipitation.

Over-compensating? Perhaps. 1

Now, I always build a few days into the calendar that are “semi-fluff” days that can be tossed overboard in case of emergency,2 but… this is starting to cut into the white meat, so to speak.

Our principal was in my 3rd period class today34 as I was teaching type I and type II errors in hypothesis testing. This would decidedly be the former.

1. Probably. Almost definitely. [↩]
2. I had 2 in this unit — fortuitously, I might add — and one in the next [↩]
3. for my formal observation [↩]
4. which, by the way. About formal observations… now that I am in year 8, I don’t feel nearly as much anxiety about being observed/evaluated as I once did. But it did take until about this point in my career to develop that level of comfort. [↩]

In my seven-and-a-half years of teaching, I have tried very hard to avoid any serious “foot-in-mouth” moments,1 but this past Thursday, as I was introducing my student teacher to my 2nd period Geometry class, I had one.

See, I was explaining to my students that my student teacher effectively has full authority in the classroom now, and that if they wanted to use the restroom or get a drink of water, they would have to ask her, and not me.

Well, one kid asked, “Mister Youn, if we ask her and she says ‘no’, then can we ask you?” 2

So I replied, “Okay, this is NOT like at home, where you ask one parent, and if they say ‘no’ then you go and ask the OTHER parent the same thing.” 3

{insert whooshing sound of foot flying in from nowhere and landing swiftly in my mouth}

The next ten seconds sounded something like:

Sigh. :(

Between snow days4 and allergy days5 we may have well spent this entire last week in AP Stat playing cards and hopscotch.

My A-day classes have yet to begin hypothesis testing, and in order to get back on schedule, it looks as if I may have to teach 2-sample procedures without teaching students the formulas.6

I’ve taught all of the inference formulas every year thus far,7 but once we start preparing for the AP exam, many teachers8 instruct their students to skip them and just use the calculator to get the answer.9

This has been one of the more frequently mentioned concerns on my end-of-year feedback forms (“if we don’t need to know the inference formulas, why do we waste so much time learning them?!” etc etc), and over the course of the past year or so, I’ve begun to ask myself the same thing.10 Hopefully everything will turn out just fine and we’ll have these ice days to thank for helping us to turn a new page.

1. you know, when you say something that you immediately wish you could “un-speak”… [↩]
2. perhaps you see where this is going… [↩]
3. raise your hand if you saw that coming, and NOW see where this is going… [↩]
4. which, by the way, lacked any semblance of actual snow [↩]
5. pretty much every day here in Austin [↩]
6. and to just perform the hypothesis tests on their graphing calculators [↩]
7. and with 2-sample proportions z-tests, the formulas are one of the worst parts of the course [↩]
8. myself included [↩]
9. which is completely acceptable on the Exam [↩]
10. Perhaps this falls under the category of “teaching things right” vs “teaching to a test”, but I don’t even know about that. [↩]

This was supposed to be a really big week.12

Instead, it has just been a really weird week.

This morning, I dragged myself into the cold3, disappointed that we hadn’t [yet] received a call notifying us to stay home for the day. By the time I was halfway to work, I’d passed three different car wrecks4, and it seriously felt like I was driving through the zombie apocalypse.5

And THEN I got the “bad weather 2 hour delay” phone call. Just as I was arriving on campus.6

But by that point it was pretty obvious that school was going to be cancelled altogether, but I decided to get some tacos from Smoky Mo’s and brew some coffee in my classroom and chill – literally.

I was amused that the 9:05 bell still rang, and that’s when we got the announcement.

At 9:05.

That’s about 3 or 4 hours late, if you ask me.

I haven’t seen my A-day students in more than a week, and the timing of these two freeze days — splitting the first major test of the semester across days a full week apart — could not be more awkward.7

1. Among other things, my student teacher assumes her teaching duties this week [↩]
2. and actually, every week is a big week, at this point [↩]
3. after having stayed up too late, thinking we wouldn’t have school today due to the ice [↩]
4. two that were single car incidents, that had obviously spun out and crashed into concrete barriers [↩]
5. The road conditions were atrocious. NOBODY should have been driving out there this morning. [↩]
6. Thankfully I did not get into a wreck, or I would seriously be ticked. [↩]
7. We’ve had ice days before — Spring of 2007, 2010, and 2012 if memory serves me right — but never in a way that splintered our calendars like so. [↩]

Edit (Friday Morning, 7:30am): Schools were in fact, cancelled completely today. Don’t mess with Texas, indeed.

Whoever coined the term “Don’t mess with Texas” obviously wasn’t referring to our ability to cope with a little bit of cold.

Practically speaking: My B-day students in AP Stat took a big test today… that A-day can no longer take tomorrow due to the shortened schedule.1

A younger version of me would have been a little peeved to have to push a test back and fall behind schedule… but this year’s version of me is just looking forward to sleeping in a little more. 2

1. yes, my B-day students are ahead of my A-day students, as happens every 2nd semester. I do that intentionally just to mix things up. My B-day students get so whiny about it, it’s almost amusing… [↩]
2. Perhaps we’ll toss some globes tomorrow~ [↩]