Skip to main content

Feltron Intro - Tuesday 9/29/15

Rocky asked if every blog post could start with a gif; I like that idea and will try to remember to do it. I'm just gonna start with my favorite:



I think yesterday felt like more material than I anticipated. I don't want you to start feeling overwhelmed. Today, I would like to slow things down and:


  1. Tell you that I think you all are doing very well. The "understanding charts" spreadsheet that has all the answers all of you submitted looks really impressive.
  2. Check in - material. You don't have to bluff... how are things going? Charts in general? The specific tool we have been playing with (Tuva)? Mean, Median, Mode, and Range?
  3. Check in - math in general. One of my goals is to show you something about how math works: even if you have a hard time doing arithmetic or getting problems right in a math class, you still might be very good at making and understanding charts, and that is a very important mathematical skill.
    • Conversely, if you have generally done well in math, but don't understand graphs and charts, you might be a little surprised by how hard you have to work to get them. Everyone's brain is different.
  4. Check in - you. I don't get to see you outside of class, so let me know what's up. Anything interesting happening in your life?
  5. Dylan, Skye, Dashiel, and Esme, pick one or two group members
    • In your groups, (using one Chromebook if necessary), answer one group member's question about something tricky from the last few classes
      • It can be about computing mean, median, mode, range, or graphing, line of best fit, what goes where on graphs...
  6. I will show you the idea I have for a project: I think we should try to each do a version of the Feltron report, which Nicholas Felton puts out every year. See the following, stunning examples:
Spend some time really looking at these, you don't have a lot of other work!

2013

2005


2012


So, the idea would be to measure various things in your life, and then chart them!

For HOMEWORK you will fill the following form out to get the ball rolling on this project:




Comments

Unknown said…
you didn't tell us to give our name
September 29, 2015 at 6:46 PM
Unknown said…
I guess we should just write it in one of the input fields...
September 29, 2015 at 6:55 PM
Unknown said…
Oops! This is the right way to handle this, at the beginning or end just add "by the way, this is Sam" or, you know, whoever you are.
September 29, 2015 at 11:13 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monday 9/28

9/28/15 Monday Check in: Friday class & Homework Classwork: As long as we’re talking climate change... If someone tells you they don’t believe humans are causing it, you might want to ask them if smoking is bad for you. Why? There is as much evidence that humans are causing global warming as there is evidence that smoking causes cancer (you don’t have to click that link, I just like to put it up). Anyway, here’s a chart: It is entitled “Breakdown of the anthropic greenhouse gas emissions by gas, in billion tons carbon equivalent, in 2004” - it is a breakdown of the greenhouse gases emitted in 2004 that humans are responsible for. What’s the biggest greenhouse gas? What’s all that CO2 doing, and where does it go? A lot of it goes into the ocean, which seems better than the air, and it is... up to a point. The more CO2 in the ocean, the more acidic it gets (And the more acidic it gets, the lower its ph gets). That is fine... until it’s not. At some...
4 comments
Read more

Statistical Studies - Tuesday 2/2/2016

Ok, today didn't go exactly as planned. If you saw the blog post I had up planned for today... we will get to that, but I incorrectly estimated how long some work would take you. Not your fault. You guys just move so fast through most material! You are working on the  Statistical Studies topic  on Khan Academy. It is not easy. That is okay. You don't have to get frustrated, or discouraged, or stressed. If it takes longer than I thought it would, I'll give you more time. Some good insights from the classwork: Go straight to the exercises, but go back to the videos if you are stuck If the videos feel too long, you can speed up playback (in the options menu, click the gear button). 1.25x isn't even noticeable. 1.5x is, but if you listen for a while you get used to it and can switch to 2x An "experiment" involves splitting a subset of the population you are looking at into two groups: one called the "control", who don't do anything diff...
5 comments
Read more

Feltron Variables - Monday 2/1/2015

Do you have your tickets... to the gun show? #flexin #doyouevenliftbro Please complete this to show you did your homework: Loading... So, let's talk about what makes this project hard: actually collecting data. It's not hard, but somehow, doing it every day is hard. It's easy to miss a day... then two... then all the sudden, you have missed a bunch, and it's scary and you don't want to think about it, so you don't do it. So we are going to preempt all that by putting some work in today to make it hard to forget. First, we will make a Google form. I started it for you, all you is copy it and add your 4 variables . Once you have that, you are going to use a cool feature of Google Sheets to have google email you this form every day. The form will be in the email itself, so all you have to do is open the email, fill out the form, and hit enter. Here are the instructions to follow . Don't be intimidated! You just have to copy and paste some cod...
2 comments
Read more