Today I subbed in a high school special ed history class. It's in my LA County district. Since it's a high school class with an aide and it isn't math, there's no need for "A Day in the Life" today.
Of the three classes that meet today, two are sophomore World History and one is junior U.S History. All classes watch videos on the 1950's -- the sophomores on the Korean War, the juniors on postwar boom. (I point out on the blog that while World History 10 starts in the late 18th century, U.S. History 11 starts in the late 19th century. But both classes reach the mid-20th century at the same time.)
Since I have trouble getting the microphone to work on Zoom, I don't sing for second period. The other two classes get a song -- and as I don't want to take time away from the videos, I choose one of my shorter songs, namely the "Row Row Row Your Boat" parodies ("Measures of Center" and "Same Sign Add and Keep").
Today is Saturday, the second day of the week on the Eleven Calendar:
Resolution #2: We make sacrifices in order to be successful at math.
Of course, I don't talk about math today, but I do discuss sacrifices. In the World History classes, the Korean War video is an hour and a half, but as I wrote yesterday, students are only required to log in to Zoom for 30 minutes. So the assignment is for the students to finish the video in order to discuss it with the regular teacher tomorrow.
But this reminds me of my last traditionalists' post -- whenever the students are assigned to watch a video at home, hardly anyone watches it, and so there's no discussion. And so I tell the students about how they should make a sacrifice -- giving up an hour of their free time to watch the video -- in order to be successful at history.
I want them to impress the regular teacher with their knowledge of the video and the Korean War. Of course, I'll never know whether any of the students will listen to me or not, since I almost certainly won't be teaching at this school tomorrow.
The video that the juniors watch is much shorter, so there's no need to talk about sacrifices. Instead, I bring up the old fifth resolution about 1955 -- the video discusses inventions that were made during the 1950's, most notably the mass production of television)
Of course, this isn't what the original 1955 resolution was about -- the inventors who were born in 1955, not the inventions made in 1955. Still, it gives me a reason to bring up the older generations and remind them that they should work as hard as they did, so that we can enjoy even more new technology.
By the way, last week during spring break, I wrote about the COVID What Ifs -- what if a pandemic had occurred during my own high school years? In particular, I described a COVID-97 world in which the schools shut down in March of my junior year, and then they reopen in April of my senior year, with a condensed Cross County and Track seasons.
Each week, I'm going to compare my 1999 Track season in the COVID-97 universe to the 2021 Track season in our real COVID-19 world. Even though my alma mater now has Track meets on different days of the week, I'll post this weekly series on Thursdays -- the day I ran in Track meets in 1999.
This week, I watched the first dual meet of the season -- a nonleague meet. The first race of the day was the girls 1600 and -- much to my surprise -- not a single girl from my alma mater was in it. I'm used to seeing noncompetitive races in which our school was opposed, but not when we were the team that didn't contest it. Perhaps the fact that it was a road meet worked against us -- several girls chose not to travel to the other school. Then again, I'm not a girl, so the girls race doesn't affect my times at all.
Our school did contest the boys 1600. The winning time was something was 4:55 by an opponent runner -- our best time was closer to 5:00, with a cluster of runners behind that. This suggests that in the COVID-97 world, many of my teammates might indeed have quit, thereby clearing the way for me to make the Varsity team.
So let me set up my COVID-97 What If with an educated guess of what my 1600 times would've been:
On April 15th, 1999 (first dual meet, nonleague), my 1600 time would have been 5:22.
This would place me in the large group of teammates -- behind the top runner at my school and even further behind the top runner at the opponent school.
Of course, I'm still a long way from determining whether I make the Varsity team or get to advance to CIF Prelims in the 1600. Let's at least get to the league meets.
Lesson 14-6 of the U of Chicago text is called "Properties of Vectors." In the modern Third Edition of the text, properties of vectors don't appear at all, as I explained yesterday.
I post my originally planned lesson for Lesson 14-6, which contains many of those properties of vector addition from the Common Core Standards that I mentioned yesterday. I'm posting an old lesson on the area of a regular hexagon.
Despite my posting a Desmos activity on Monday, I'm still scheduling another pandemic-friendly activity for tomorrow.
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