1st Placement - In the Books!

The final week was actually the only full, 5 day week of my placement at School Without Walls. It was a little bumpy on Monday, which was the first day after the winter break. Several students had missed the previous Friday, and with snow days I hadn't seen them in 14 days.

I focused on permutations and combinations on Monday and Wednesday, and things went pretty well. On Friday, I briefly touched on the multiplication counting principle as a lead in to a blackjack probability experiment. I had hoped to go more deeply into the probabilities of the game, but the two lost snow days made a difference. We computed the theoretical probability of getting a blackjack with a shuffled deck and a 2 card deal, which turns out to be 4.8%. Then in pairs, students shuffled and dealt 50 times and recorded whether or not they got a blackjack. Theoretically, you should expect about 2.5 blackjacks per 50 deals, and the numbers ranged from 1 to 6 in both classes. But when combining the data, the morning class ended up with 4.7% (wow!), with about 6% in the afternoon class. Overall, it was a really good example of the numbers working out pretty well!

I had the opportunity to remove my first student from class on Friday. A young lady was reading the newspaper (!), and after a minute or two I asked her to please put it away. A minute or two later I asked again, she made no attempt to do anything, and I was committed. I asked her again, and reached for the paper, at which point she slapped her hands down on it to prevent me from taking it. Then I calmly directed her to leave the room, go to the principals office and explain to him what happened. She packed up and left. My SBE didn't get involved, but did offer to see her advisor and asked him to speak with her. The advisor did and in consultation with my SBE, her punishment is to attend a TI calculator event on Saturday, March 24. Apparently they also had a conversation to the effect of "you can decide for yourself whether you want to apologize". I saw her a number of times in the hall and she apparently decided not.

This particular girl has numerous home and personal issues, and was only in about 50% of the classes. While in class she often displayed indifference, poor attitude, anger, and so forth. My take on the whole situation is that she is not atypical of urban students, with little social or family support, and they feel they are always being attacked. As teachers we just have to keep trying with students like this. If it wasn't my last day, I would have tried to find out a little more detail about what makes her tick, and try to make some sort of connection. But reading a newspaper in class is clearly off the table!