Sam's Blog

After Issy determines who did their homework, you guys will spend the class working on Independent Probability . While that is happening, I'd like you to also make a spreadsheet and start entering your data in it. (Iggy, Dash, Dylan and Matthew should be able to show you how). Your only homework over the next week and a half is to: Keep track of your data and enter it into your spreadsheet. After this week and a half break, you will need to send me a spreadsheet of your data. Then we will work on graphing it in interesting ways, and looking for insights in it. (You can start doing that over break if you are the type that puts work off).

Marcelle and I had a baby yesterday!!! It seems that I will be needed at home for a bit. I will be back as soon as I can... but in the meantime, you lucky kids have Issy subbing. Today's schedule 8:30-8:35 Probably get dismissed from circle late 8:35-8:50 Discuss homework ("talk to your parents/family about a time they had to make an important decision and probability/statistics played a big part") 8:50-9:25 Work on: Simple Probability Adding Probability Watch the videos, work in pairs, or ask Issy as-needed. It's homework if you don't finish 9:25 Straighten up, dismissal

I heard lots of complaints about long-term projects in Spanish. Well... We have one in math. Please don't forget about it, and start imagining how you will graph the data you've been collecting. Today's discussion was really good. Turns out, the ECV didn't work - Poppy refuses to turn. It was really wild to watch her fight back against being rotated (on the ultrasound). Finally, as we said in class, your homework is to talk to your parents/family about a time they had to make an important decision and probability/statistics played a big part : medical, financial, school-related are some ideas.

sorry this is late. I was asleep, fighting this fever, and then Marcelle had to go to the doctor all day and it was a bit scary. But everything is ok. Here is the assignment (aren't you glad you already wrote it down like I told you to??) Khan academy exercises: Comparing probabilities And Experimental probability

Let's play a game: There is one weighted coin; the rest are fair. You have to figure out which one is unfair... to leave the classroom. Good luck! Homework Flip a coin 100 times. Record the sequence of flips, eg, H, T, T, H... Count  He number of heads and number of tails. What was your longest streak?

We talked about valid claims. The idea is, sometimes you would like to talk about a group of people without measuring every single one of them. We will talk about this more soon, but to understand it, we will need to understand a concept: Correlation vs Causation. Correlation When two things change together, we can use a fancy word and say they are correlated. When things are correlated, if we know one, we automatically  know the other, at least somewhat. Here's what I mean: If I tell you that a human exists, you don't know much about their weight. The smallest baby ever born (and survive), Rumasia Rahman, weighed a little more than 0.5 pounds (lbs). Jon Brower Minnoch, on the other hand, was the heaviest person ever, and weighed 1,400 lbs at his heaviest. That means that if all I tell you about someone is that "they are a person", and ask "what do you think they weigh?" you only know they weigh between 0.5 lbs and 1,400 lbs - though they probably

I'm feeling the thanksgiving spirit: Ok, you all are doing great. Today, more weird statistics stuff:  Valid claims . It may not feel like math, but it is. Statistics is weird like that, so it used to be the branch of math everyone made fun of. NoW, thanks to the Internet, there's so much data and only statistics can make sense of it, so the stats people get all the jobs and money.  Then review fractions. I recommended it to you on Khan Academy, so it will show up on your dashboard. If you can't find it: https://www.khanacademy.org/math/cc-fourth-grade-math/cc-4th-fractions-topic/cc-5th-common-denominators/e/common-denominators https://www.khanacademy.org/math/cc-fourth-grade-math/cc-4th-fractions-topic/cc-4th-visualizing-equiv-frac/e/different-wholes

You need: a pencil, paper, your data journal, and a chromebook Fill in this form/classwork thing ON YOUR OWN: Loading... Then when you finish that, work on Understanding Multiplying Fractions by Fractions Constructing Scatter Plotts Before you leave, make sure I have given you credit for your data journal!

Extra funny gif today! Sorry that so many of you struggled with the homework. I thought that would be easy review. There are a lot more people with a lot more trouble with fractions than I am used to. That is okay. Sometimes, when a comment feels like criticism, it is really easy to get defensive, and try to give reasons or fight back. What I am going to say sounds like criticism, but it is not; it's concern: Fractions are elementary school material. If you haven't learned them yet, you should feel that it is urgent that you do, because you will  have an easier time of things once you understand them. You are not dumb, and you are not bad at math, for not having learned fractions yet . If anything, you are impressive for being able to keep up in math classes without  understanding fractions. But now it's really time to learn them. Often, just learning fractions is the difference between feeling good or bad at math. There is an entire website devoted just to this! H

Lesson: Finding a missing value given the mean Note to self: don't mention that it's algebra. Before we can go much further in the course, I have to make sure that everyone can manipulate fractions. If you can: great! You will have an easy time. If you can't - I will show you some new ways to look at it that I hope will help. Fraction work - everyone has to do it: Ordering Fractions Adding Fractions Subtracting Fractions Multiplying Fractions Homework: Finish the above, and Finding a missing value given the mean

Welcome back! I hear that it was a great camping trip. I am proud of you. I know that you are all tired after camping then Halloween. So here is what we will do: 8:30-8:50 Get caught up, if you still are missing the assignments I mentioned on Thursday, go to Liz. Then Sam goes over "Exploring the Mean and Median." 8:50-9:05 Work assigned on Thursday and any missing work. 9:05-9:30 If the class, on average, is being good, a nice surprise.  If you are done with all work, I don't want you to be bored. Nor do I want to "punish" you with extra work for moving quickly. So, from 8:30-9:05, feel free to: Do other work you need to do Go to codecademy.com and start programming. It is fun and lucrative and I can help you Work on something I may  assign in the future.