Last post has plans for today – linear equations in Excel, without too much fuss about slope and intercept.
Several students will be absent for a variety of reasons – illness, illness in the family, ?, … One consequence of the frequent absences distributed randomly is that I can’t count on everyone having the advantage of my words of wisdom on every topic. Having them read those words in the book and the exercise solutions (assuming they do read them) isn’t quite the same.
I don’t have a solution to this problem.
Read in the paper this morning about www.challenge.treas.gov/– unfortunately, I can’t ask my students to take it since only secondary school teachers can sign up for access codes.
Half the class. We went over the College Cost increase data – histogram, mean, median, mode – concentrating on seeing how Excel made the computations once we understood what computations to ask for. I found myself switching back and forth frequently between [show values] and [show formulas]. I need to put more of that into the text.
I did start linear equations in Excel. Making changes on the fly turned out to be very instructive.
Learned about
- the dollar sign to prevent Excel from updating a cell reference when copied
- compared fixed with automatic settings of vertical scale
- worked A LOT on why these graphs were SCATTER PLOTS, not LINE CHARTS (the natural first guess. Switching to one (or to a pie chart!) on the fly was very instructive. You could see the nonsense.
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