First class after spring break, which was warm and sunny and not conducive to work – for me or for the students. Graded papers on the T on the way to school today and discovered, not to my surprise, that about half the students can’t manage the centerpiece of the Excel work we’ve been doing for two weeks: estimating mean, median and mode from a histogram. What to do about this? I think that perhaps at least three quarters (maybe more) can in fact learn to do this if I patiently explain it several more times, preferably to one student at a time. But should I? Is that use of time consistent with my “what will they learn here that will be important and memorable ten years from now?” philosophy? Clearly not. I think I’m going to bag this topic. Some students will be unable to do that problem on the final. They are likely to be the ones taking the course pass/fail, and they’ll pass if they can do enough other stuff.
What I want to do instead is start talking about taxes. That they will surely need ten years from now. I don’t want to lecture much (never a good idea) and I can’t write a lot on the board since my right shoulder is temporarily sore and I don’t want to aggravate the injury. I might have a student write on the board.
I’d like to get to a place where we can work out a virtual tax return on one of the many web sites offering that as a free service. I found one yesterday that will accept 000-000-0000 as a social security number.
Will report later on what we actually did.
No one complained about the decision to give up on mean/median/mode from histograms.
I thought the tax discussion went well. Started with a discussion of kinds of taxes (federal income, fica (social security), sales, gas, inheritance …) . Restricted focus to federal income tax. Imagined a gross income of $100K (salary, rental income, gambling winnings, tips, yard sale proceeds, stock dividends, bank interest). Listed some possible deductions (child care, state taxes, charities, …) and decided on an adjusted gross income of $50K. Then found the 2012 tax brackets on the web and computed the tax, which came to about $8,500, so an effective tax rate of 17% (of AGI) of 8.5% (of gross).
Finished by starting a free tax return at H&R Block, with fake name, email, social security number, dependent the same age as his father… Will come back to that on Thursday.
blog home page