I was so happy that Jared shared his prom photos and stories with me. We spent the first few minutes, as we always do, catching up with things. I could tell that Jared was preoccupied after receiving his ACT scores, so I thought to distract him by continuing with the documentary we started on Friday. We managed only ten minutes before Jared started asking extremely relevant questions regarding particle physics facilities, such as CERN. I took the opportunity to discuss certain aspects of particle physics, including historical facilities here in the US, and the connection to statistics: very large datasets that ultimately yield one number plus or minus an error margin.

It's been a while since we watched a documentary, and since Jared has worked so hard and so well this week, I thought it would be nice to finish it off with a documentary. PBS Nova's "The Great Math Mystery" is a riveting expose on our mathematical minds that not only presents the practical aspect of math (landing the Mars Curiosity rover, building skyscrapers, smashing elementary particles into each other) but also delves into philosophical questions: Is math an inherent part of nature, or does it exist only in our minds? I actually had to tell Jared to stand up and move around and get a glass of water halfway through, he was so engrossed in the material!

We discussed the addition and multiplication rules ("and"=> multiply; "or" => add.) We worked several examples on the white board. We discussed conditional probability and probabilities involving removal of an object from a set of objects with and without replacement.

We concentrated on Jared improving his grade on the Probability test he sat before Spring Break. I asked Jared to concentrate on interpreting the problems from a verbal point of view, and not simply writing down an answer that he figured might be the correct one based on the numbers that are given. Jared did a very good job of attempting the problems again.

It was so nice to see Jared after the break! Since he was sick yesterday, I thought it would be nice to simply catch up with Jared, ask him how his break was. I was very positively impressed, though, since Jared had been thinking about a math problem over the break, and so we discussed it in class. I also told him we would have to review the material on the Probability test that he sat before the break, and quickly showed him the material we'll be going over.

I understand Jared was attending his grandmother's funeral today.

Jared sat for a test on probabilities today. He concentrated very well on his task, and gets full marks for that. We will review the test after Spring Break to ensure that his understanding of the subtleties of the topic is solid.

We continued where we left off yesterday, and covered scenarios where both A or B occur, and whether the events are joint or disjoint. We also covered complements, and conditional probabilities. We finished class by discussing the all-important topic of true and false positives and true and false negatives, especially when dealing with testing on human subjects.

In our effort to formalize Jared's learning of Statistics, we started today with a thorough review of Probabilities. Jared has a natural instinct for calculating probabilities, but I want to ensure that when faced with a test situation, he knows how to parse what the problems are targeting. Some of this involves verbal interpretation, but much of it is down to recognizing formal notation. Today we covered Independent and Dependent events.

We continued with the algebra review, since it was my intention to go over topics that overlap with the statistics class. We worked on Permutations and Combinations, in addition to some of the other algebra topics. I hope Jared feels better soon!