Back to school: this year, geometry and AP Statistics

This year I’m back in the math department, teaching geometry and AP Statistics. This is the first year ever that I’ve had a year teaching subjects I’ve taught before. One of the things I realized at the end of the last academic year–the end of my tenth year of teaching middle- and high-school students–that I’d taught 24 different subjects in those years, or taught out of textbooks that were so dramatically different from others I’d used that it might as well have been teaching a new course. It’s nice to return to something familiar and concentrate on teaching and classroom management instead of reinventing a new curriculum.

I have 5 geometry classes and 1 AP Statistics class. With 31 students in a room that comfortably holds 24, it’s a bit tight, but it’s great fun to be teaching juniors and seniors after an absence of 5 years.

The lead-in picture was our first data gathering, a classification of people’s birthdays. The top diagram shows what the composite looked like for the entire class; the students then separated the birthdays by gender to see if there were any patterns. With only 31 data points, it’s hard to draw any real conclusions, but it started the students thinking about gathering statistics about themselves and analyzing them.

The next class I had a harder but more insightful exercise. The students measured their heights (in inches; we are an Imperial-system country, alas, unlike the rest of the world) and then posted it. This exercise was my reintroduction to high-school students after 4 years in teaching middle school. They follow succinct instructions well, figure things out, and were off measuring without any additional help from me, probably taking about one-third the time middle-schoolers would have taken.

The major problem is that I now have 3 whiteboards in my class, and there’s not a lot of clear wall to measure. They adapted creatively. Here as some of them measuring against the Greek alphabet on a concrete column:

Others measured by the closed classroom door:

And others found whatever space they could:

At the end, they placed their measurements using Post-its to create a histogram. I’d never tried using Post-its for the purpose before this year, but they work remarkably well. Even without segregating by gender, the height differences between male and female were obvious (pink is female; blue is male, and yes, I know it’s a cliche):

You’ll be seeing more of their work as the year progresses!

N.B.: I will be finishing the various journeys we’ve taken at some point, but everything has been preparation for the beginning of school since August 1. Stay tuned (or “watch this space,” which I gather has replaced “stay tuned”)