Today I subbed in an AP Economics class. It's in my new district. Since it's a high school class that isn't math, there's no need for "A Day in the Life" today.
All three classes I see today are AP Econ -- zero, first, and third periods. Just as in most Economics classes, the students are all seniors. Notice that I, as a young high school student, took AP Econ as junior. I was in the magnet program where social science was taught in the reverse order from the standard sequence, including semester Econ/Government in freshman year. This allows students to take the AP equivalents in Grades 10-12. I took AP Econ as a junior and AP Government as a senior. (In fact, I didn't join the magnet until junior year -- and so I had to take those AP classes, otherwise I'd have had neither class required to graduate.)
In this class, the students have an interesting project -- the Greebes project. Students work in groups to create a two-minute commercial for Greebes chips, which may have special properties, such as magically building your muscles, giving you great speed or good looks, or speaking Spanish. (I'm not quite sure of the origin of the term "Greebes" -- it appears to be a "metasyntactic" product used in Econ classes, just as "foo" and "bar" are used as variables in computer coding.)
As for today's song, it reverts back to "U-N-I-T Rate!" This is because, as is often the case in high schools, seniors don't need to attend Days 178-180. Thus this is the last day for seniors -- and to celebrate, students wear college jackets for the schools they'll attend this fall. (One girl even has a Yale jacket on -- and so I congratulate her for being a future Ivy leaguer.) And so I sing my UCLA fight song parody, even though the regular teacher appears to be a former USC Trojan.
For tutorial, I sing an extra song, which happens to be Square One TV's "Ghost of a Chance." By the way, it's rather profound that, for some of these seniors (specifically the ones in third period but don't have a fifth period -- perhaps because they also have a zero period instead), I am teaching the last K-12 class that they will ever have. And for the period zero students, this is the last time that they'll ever take a class that starts that early, as most colleges don't schedule classes before 8 AM.
Today is Friday, the first day of the week on both the Eleven and Gregorian Calendars:
Resolution #1: We are good at math. We just need to improve at other things.
This is something that I hope these seniors will take to heart, as they move on to take their math placement tests at their new college. I hope they will pass the test and place into credit rather than remedial math.
Today I arrived at the League Finals Track meet, in time for the 1600 final. Well, I was waiting to find out what time the last CIF qualifier needed to make, and I hear it from the announcer -- it's 4:31. As it turns out, only one runner from our league hits this time -- and he wasn't from my alma mater. Two more runners, including one from my school, finish a few seconds too slow.
Meanwhile, my own times from back then are much too slow -- and even though the COVID-97 is just a What If? story, I only want to include plausible times.
And so this officially ends the Track part of my COVID-97 story. I'll probably write another post about COVID-97 and all the other COVID What If? stories at some point.
Question 33 of the SBAC Practice Exam is on writing an equation:
Mike earns $6.50 per hour plus 4% of his sales.
Enter an equation for Mike's total earnings, E, when he works x hours and has a total of y sales, in dollars.
Well, the equation almost writes itself. Just read the first sentence out loud:
Mike earns (E =) $6.50 (6.5) per hour (x) plus (+) 4% (0.04) of his sales (y).
E = 6.5x + 0.04y
The tricky part of course is writing the decimals 6.5 and 0.04 properly -- especially the conversion of 4% to a decimal.
Both the girl and the guy from the Pre-Calc class write the correct equation -- with my help, during class that day.
Question 34 of the SBAC Practice Exam is on writing and solving a system of equations:
The basketball team sold t-shirts and hats as a fund raiser. They sold a total of 23 items and made a profit of $246. They made a profit of $10 for every t-shirt they sold and $12 for every hat they sold.
Determine the number of t-shirts and the number of hats the basketball team sold.
Enter the number of t-shirts in the first response box.
Enter the number of hats in the second response box.
If we let s be the number of shirts and h be the number of hats. Then the equations are:
s + h = 23
10s + 12h = 246
Let's solve this system by substitution:
s + h = 23
s = 23 - h
10s + 12h = 246
10(23 - h) + 12h = 246
230 - 10h + 12h = 246
230 + 2h = 246
2h = 16
h = 8
s + h = 23
s + 8 = 23
s = 15
Therefore the team sold 15 t-shirts and eight hats.
The girl correctly writes and solves the system by substitution as I show above. Unfortunately, the guy leaves this problem blank.
In fact, throughout these 34 problems, it appears that the guy more easily gives up and avoids trying to work out the more difficult problems. The girl is at least more willing to attempt them.
At first, it appeared that one of the guy's strengths is factoring, as he did well on the early problems that require him to factor. But yesterday, the girl factored the quadratic function correctly while the guy mixed up two of the terms.
Both students, of course, have already long completed the SBAC. I wonder how well these two students fared on the state test, but I most likely will never know.
Today is our last activity day. In the past I forced probability into the activity, since probability is part of the California Geometry curriculum. Here's an intro to probability by Lisa Emerson:
https://teacher.desmos.com/activitybuilder/custom/5ffd8fb43bb8230d4c9db01b
By the way, if you remember that Geometry class that I covered for a week in January (and continue to receive emails for the rest of this year), Chapter 12 of that class is probability. Indeed, the teacher gave her Chapter 12 Test last week. Once again, many students lost points from their computer score for failing to show work, but she also added some points, when a student entered a decimal where the computer expected a percent, or vice versa. (See -- I was able to tie today's Question 33 to today's Desmos after all.)
Create equations in two or more variables to represent relationships between quantities; graph equations on coordinate axes with labels and scales.
Represent constraints by equations or inequalities, and by systems of equations and/or inequalities, and interpret solutions as viable or nonviable options in a modeling context. For example, represent inequalities describing nutritional and cost constraints on combinations of different foods.
Commentary: Both of these word problems should be straightforward, but the first is tricky for students who don't remember percents. Students are likely to give up on the conversion step and never reach solving the system for the last problem.
Monday is Memorial Day, and so my next post will be on Tuesday.
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