Plan: do the homework problems on regression due Thursday. I still can’t write on the board – my shoulder isn’t well enough yet for me to write on the board – I’ll have them work in groups if possible. I think that’s better than my doing excel on the screen.
Moral question for a teacher. Suppose half (more or less) of the students have opened their eyes in a new way in this course while the rest are floundering and confused. That’s a bimodal distribution of success/value. If I taught a more traditional (boring, old fashioned) math course I’d have a normal distribution. Good students would do well (with their eyes closed), some students would still be lost in the tail, most would manage well enough- but would end up with little of lasting value. Which is better? Of course I’ve framed the question in a way that begs for the answer I want. I will pass just about everyone who shows up in class, and bask in the thought that for some the experience was genuinely educational.
Yes! Worked in groups on the homework and it worked. Why am I always surprised? They spent the most time on and learned the most from the global warming problem. Teaching groups of 2 or 3 sounds inefficient. It is, if you are just measuring new words per minute said, since it calls for lots of repetition. But it isn’t inefficient if you measure what the students actually learn.
I learned that they don’t know what “parts per million” means – so need to add a question on converting that to percentages. And put a ppm question into the chapter on percentages.
On one of the plots (temperature as a function of CO2, I think) Excel started the y axis at 0, which made the temperatures (all about 11 degrees C) seem to cluster around a line. Changing the scale showed the variability. Need to put that in the book too.
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