I woke up on Monday thinking, “If this week is anything like last, it will end me.”

We are past hump-day and it has not ended me.

Thankful.

Today1 was the “Burgers and Boxplots” lesson. I love this one, for obvious reasons. 2

It made me happy to know that a much larger proportion of my students are now familiar with Carls Jr.3 and In-N-Out than in previous years. :)

The Mega Tamago gets ’em every time, though:4

Mmmmm hmmmmm. 5

Oh, the point of the lesson was to analyze the distribution of fat grams in a number of fast-food burgers, and to identify the median / quartiles / 5-number summary, run the 1.5IQR outlier test, and sketch a modified box plot.6 7

When I stop to think — and breathe — it blows my mind a bit when I realize that we’re already in week 6. I know, it’s early, but… the overwhelming feeling I have is that the rest of this year is going to go by far too quickly.

1. and yesterday, for A-day [↩]
2. Because I’m a burger freak. Now you know. [↩]
3. The Double Western: 63 grams of fat! [↩]
4. 65 grams of fat! [↩]
5. Of course, we needed to point out that as with any McDonald’s burger, the picture makes it look WAY bigger — and nicer — than the actual thing. I told them to use Google to look for real pictures of the thing just for kicks. [↩]
6. Incidentally, the Wendy’s Baconator Triple has 81 grams of fat. That might be an outlier… [↩]
7. A student asked me today if I was familiar with the Gourdough’s Burger. I had to explain that this was a wonderful creation that unfortunately came into existence too late in my life… sigh. [↩]

This is one of those weeks that I’m gonna look back on and have no idea how I actually made it through.

Just for reference, the “Breaking Bad” marathon is currently in the midst of season 4… the “You Got Me (WW)” episode is starting as I type this. Looking forward to the finale this Sunday.

(Disclaimer #1: This post has nothing to do with my teaching life.)

When Apple announced the Gold iPhone two weeks ago, I immediately thought, “Sony!”

(Disclaimer #2: The rest of this post is going to date me somewhat. Not quite so much as 8-tracks, but… something like.)

Here is the last piece of consumer electronics that I owned in gold:

Back in a previous life, I used to do some consumer electronics reviews for Minidisc units — this was back when Minidiscs kinda sorta used to matter (which is basically before the iPod came out and flash/HD-based mp3 players took over the market).

In 20041, Sony released their flagship model portable MD recorder, the MZ-NH1, and one of the two color options was Champagne Gold. 2 I had to pull this sucker out from the depths of my storage, but it’s still kickin’ — I was still using it to record bootlegs as recently as 2008.

For a brief few years, these things were slick – miniature re-writable optical disks encased in protective cartridges that carried 74 minutes of music — back when we actually measured our music in minutes and seconds, as opposed to megabytes and gigabytes.3

I remember back then, me and friends would ogle at the mere fantasy of a single all-in-one device that could function as a phone and music device and camera and… you know, not actually suck. We opined that the consumer electronics companies would NEVER let it happen4.

Turns out we weren’t that far off.

1. if memory serves me right [↩]
2. I’ve always suspected that Apple has some former Sony electronics aficionados in their design ranks… [↩]
3. Sony finally tried modernizing their MiniDisc line by allowing storage of mp3’s on their disks, and increased the capacity up to 1GB. [↩]
4. since it would probably cannibalize product sales [↩]

Don’t you hate it when you speak too soon?

Last time, I wrote:

This is about the time of year when I feel like the students start to break out of their slightly nervous, semi-tentative, “not-sure-how-you-want-me-to-behave-in-here” shells, and begin to open up and start to feel comfortable with you as a teacher.

Specifically, I wrote that that was a good thing – that the students start to feel comfortable with you and begin to open up.

Well. There’s also a downside to that:

The students start to feel comfortable with you and begin to open up.

In particular, this past Friday and today kinda sorta somewhat made me want to pull my hair out. Like… maybe you sometimes liked it better when everyone was in that “shy” phase. -_-

I’m gonna blame the change in weather.1

So… I tell my students that in Statistics, we sometimes have to discuss generalizations and stereotypes.

One of my favorite activities in AP Stat is “Rent-a-date”,2 which we did this past block on Friday/Monday.

Students are given $22 to spend on an “ideal mate”. 3

Kids are then given sticky-notes with which they head to the whiteboard, which has a list of qualities along a ready-made horizontal axis, and stick their notes to mark their desired qualities.4 Girls and guys get different colors so that we can see the contrast. Here are a couple of pics that demonstrate what we’d pretty much expect (I won’t need to tell you which colors represent which genders):

Yes, guys usually spring for “Attractive body”, “Hot”, and “Good-looking face”,5 while the girls want stuff like “Goal-oriented”, “Sense of Humor”, and — of course — “Tall”.6 Very few kids — guys OR girls — care much for “Popular”.7 8

One of the things I find most amusing: Girls don’t always want to shell out money for things like “romantic” or “well-mannered”, and in almost every class, you can hear the girls saying stuff like,

We don’t need to pay for those things — we can train them later.”9

Mmmm hmmm. -_-10

1. which, by the way, has been gorgeous. [↩]
2. I borrowed this activity from Penny Smeltzer over at WWHS, by the way – it was not my concoction. [↩]
3. We have to throw out the disclaimer that we are talking about qualities that we would find desirable in a long-term relationship, and not just a cheap one-time fling. That always draws some groans of disapproval. -_- [↩]
4. By the way, in four years of doing this activity, I think this is the first year in which a few kids have quipped — mostly jokingly — “this isn’t school appropriate!” But then they usually just go along with it cuz… well… it’s all in good fun. [↩]
5. I know — SHOCK. [↩]
6. Double SHOCK. [↩]
7. This is actually somewhat reassuring. [↩]
8. Here’s a funny footnote: I noted that in one of my classes, we had a LOT of sticky notes — both genders — for “Intelligent”. A student quipped: “Dude, almost everyone in this class is either Indian or Asian.” LOL! [↩]
9. To which, the guys usually look around the room, befuddled, as if to say, “what ARE we, dogs?!” [↩]
10. Oh, by the way, the point of “Rent-a-date” — YES, there IS a point to this superficial ridiculosity — is to discuss side-by-side bar graphs, and to discuss proper — and improper — ways of describing a graphical display of qualitative data. Specifically: Don’t describe center / shape / spread with categorical data. But really we just do this because it’s fun. [↩]