superpig to the rescue

I finally sat down at my desk at 5:00pm and had time to think for the first time.  I sat just breathing for a moment and let the meetings and the papers and the classes and the sheer craziness of the day wash over me.  I looked across my desk to one of my favorite things.  This silly purple pig was a prize won by my students last year for selling magazines as a fundraiser for our school.  They earned Superpig because I asked them to do it.  I had never won a pig before and these students tried extra hard just so I could have him.  Groups that won the pig were entered in a pig race.  Superpig got last place last.  

 

I love this pig.

 

Whenever I am feeling a little down, I turn on Superpig and his snorting shuffle always makes me laugh.  He reminds me that I work in a wonderful place with amazing students and dedicated colleagues, and no amount of crazy will ever change this. 

 

I really needed Superpig to cheer me up.  Batteries practically dead, he gave me what he had and I am grateful.

 

Tomorrow I will begin again. 

 

can I borrow a calculator?

Day 3 of Spirit Week was an exciting one.  The day's events included the annual Powderpuff Football game.  Our junior and senior girls faced off in flag football, the boys acted as coaches and cheerleaders.  I have mixed feelings about this event always.  I am a huge fan of the idea of supporting our female athletes.  In fact, the crowd was quite large and plenty rowdy.  But of course our boys always push the limits of parody wearing matching short shorts with words emblazoned across the rear.  They did lead the fans in rousing cheers and even created some interesting pyramids and lifts. 

The game was rough and close with several tackles rather than simple flag pulling.  The seniors led at the half 13-12, but the juniors came back to score one more time.  In the the end, the juniors upset the seniors, 18-13. 

As I walked toward the parking lot, I thought about this event and listened to the kids talking.  "This was the best game ever," proclaimed one male cheerleader.  "That was so much fun," another junior raved excitedly.  My own junior cub and coach told me the class plan was to "win everything."  I am sure a bunch of seniors have other ideas, but the rivalry is clearly on.

There were a couple of minor injuries and a possible torn ACL in our starting softball catcher.  I wonder whether she will think it was worth it if she can't play this spring.  I saw her this morning, frantically hopping around in a knee brace looking to borrow a calculator to take her math test.  Gears shifted, she is already back in student mode.

I'm not sure I have any deep and meaningful revelations today.  Instead I am reminded that youth are resilient, gender stereotypes are persistent, traditions are powerful, and worry is wasteful. 

now I've heard everything

Homecoming week:                     Day 2 - Benjamin Button Day

I never saw the movie or read the book, The Curious Case of  Benjamin Button, but my understanding is that he is both old and young in the story.  Our students were instructed to dress as a child or a senior citizen.  Those dressed as toddlers wore footie pajamas and carried stuffed toys.  Those dressed as seniors wore bathrobes and slippers, plaid suits with high water pants, or house dresses.  A few had canes, spectacles, and powdered hair, walkers, or wheelchairs. 

The net result was that students mostly came to school in their pajamas.

I was going to write a treatise on our cultural stereotype of senior citizens, but then a student stopped me in my tracks with the following question.  

"May I go to the restroom?  I think I have my diaper on backwards." 

You can see how this week gets out of control by Friday...

Photo Credit

mirror, mirror

On Monday we began spirit week, a five day celebration of school spirit.  I will attempt to chronicle some of the events of the week, but to be fair, there's no way to describe the inevitable, escalating spiral into chaos.  Most days I make a run at getting something done, but by the end of the week, there's little I can do but laugh and enjoy the ride.  The students are happily enjoying their school, their friends, and being young.  I am going to indulge in two of the three.

Monday:  Dress up as your alter-ego day.  The students are interpreting this as dress as what you are not.  Thus far I have seen students dress as cowboys, goth girls, members of various athletic teams, skaters, nerds, their parents, hippies, rockers, rappers, the opposite gender, and a host of characters that I don't recognize.    

I think it's a worthwhile exercise to consider what you are not.  I was interested in how this day would turn out, as I think there is some potential here for offense as we dive into stereotypes.  What we are and are not is sometimes a matter of genetics, more often a matter of choice.  Others can often clearly see who we are, simply by considering our dress, our words, and our behavior.  But what does it say when we choose one aspect of ourselves and highlight that it is specifically what we are not?  I think it begs the question, why is this what you are not?  


I dressed as normal.  The kids asked me what I was.  I replied "not cool."  I don't think they got it... 

Photo Credit

truth... with a side of bacon

Teachers are actually people. 

I know that seems like a ridiculous statement, but I think people forget sometimes that we are just like everyone else most days.  We don't have superhuman abilities to manage teeneagers.  We don't have endless patience.  And we definitely have lives, friends, and family.  Our weekdays revolve around our school and our students, but I just want to mention one thing to all those readers out there, be you parents, students, colleagues, or friends.  

NOT EVERYTHING IS ABOUT YOU.

I see my students everywhere in the Orlando area, in restaurants, at concerts, in the grocery store.  I remember one student looking in my cart, and asking in a stunned voice, "You eat bacon?" 

Yes...  yes I do.  I've also been having a decade long on-again, off-again love affair with Swedish Fish.  I do a lot of things that students and parents don't know about.  I have interests and friends unrelated to my career.  I have my own children and some days they drive me nuts.  They drive their teachers nuts sometimes too.  And I know this will shock you, but I'm not a superhero.

So I'm asking you, dear reader, to cut teachers a break.  We have bad days.  We lose our temper.  We are sad and happy, excited and exhausted.  And all this means that not every day is a perfect day for us or for our students.  We are truly sorry for those days.  But we keep coming back because we believe that maybe for one kid, maybe for your kid, we can make a difference. Even on a Monday morning, we come back to try again, because we love our disciplines, our students, and our schools.

And bacon...  I for one definitely love bacon.

Photo Credit

surf's up... the solution

I think it's easy for people that love math and have studied it for years to quickly grasp mathematical ideas and solutions, simply by reading them.  To those with passions in other disciplines, reading about how to do a math problem may be both unsatisfying and a challenge.  I am going to try to explain the solution to the surfing problem without any fancy math terms or formulas.  The answer will be a little less precise, but I hope to give you some insights in how to think about the problem  You can tell me if this makes sense.

Here's the question again: 

The Surfboard Store sells Special Surfboards that

are so carefully made that only 1 in 1 thousand

is bad. The store tests all Special Surfboards

using a test that is 99% accurate. If you buy

a Special Surfboard that tests bad, what is the

probability that it really is bad?

Start with the first sentence:  One in a thousand surfboards is bad.  Let's look at a thousand surfboards.  How many are actually bad?  I hope you said 1. 

 

 

The next sentence says that the test is 99% accurate, meaning that 1% of the time it misidentifies a surfboard....  so in the remaining 999 good surfboards, 1%  or about 10 will be identified incorrectly as bad when they are really good. 

 

 

Thus we have 11 surfboards identified as bad, but there is only one surfboard that is actually bad in the bad group.  1/11 is roughly .09 or 9%.

 

Thus the probability that a surfboard identified by the 99% accurate test as bad actually is bad is only about 9%. 

 

 

What makes this idea important in my mind is less about the calculations and more about the counter intuitive nature of the solution.  When we hear that a test is 99% accurate, we tend to think that it must be absolutely correct.  

There are interesting implications when we apply this idea to politics.  There are life-changing implications when we consider this idea in the context of medicine. 

Statistics is an incredibly important and largely misunderstood discipline.  Math teachers have an important responsibility in addressing this problem.  I'm not sure we are doing the job very well. 

I welcome your comments on this problem's explanation and on statistics in general.

 

surf's up

What if I tried to teach you some math?  I know, a word problem...  the most dreaded thing in all of mathematics.  Let's make it about probability, one of the most misunderstood and difficult things for folks to master.  Wanna try?

This is a problem offered to our students this week in the monthly Florida Math league contest.  Lots of schools across the state participate.  Not many of our kids got it, but surely you are smarter that a high school student, right?? 

The Surfboard Store sells Special Surfboards that

are so carefully made that only 1 in 1 thousand

is bad. The store tests all Special Surfboards

using a test that is 99% accurate.  If you buy

a Special Surfboard that tests bad, what is the

probability that it really is bad?

Think about it a while and put your answer in the comments here or at the forum where this is posted. (or you can message me if you're shy) I will try to explain the answer tomorrow.