We completed her final review packet. She needs to look over all of the concepts to let them sink in, however, she knows what she's doing. The hardest part now is recognizing the different cases (just takes a little extra practice).
We picked up on collecting data for Jared's project. While doing so, we discussed various pitfalls associated with data collection. One thing to bear in mind is people's innate bias. When tackling a self-contained sample such as MLB teams, there is no danger of succumbing to it (a finite number of teams), but when having to pick and choose a sample from a population, one might target particular sample subsets. Another issue is cherrypicking data to suit your desired outcome. In fact, we are going to re-visit Malcolm Gladwell's (the author of 'Outliers', the book that has fascinated Jared for a while now and from which the first chapter is the basis for Jared's study) initial study on Canadian hockey teams to ensure that he did not choose data from a team that fulfilled his purposes.
Session Minutes
60
Minutes Student Attended
60
Lesson Comments
Jared was still very wired, but maybe a bit less so than yesterday. I'm starting classes with him taking ten deep breaths before we tackle anything. But for the first hour (Stats) he remained fairly focused, considering.
Jared was pretty wired (in a positive way!) after his lunch break today, and I quickly realized that a formal math class was probably not going to work. So instead we worked on his Christmas poster – the school is organizing an event tomorrow in which the younger students will bring in holiday foods from different countries. In conjunction with this, they also prepared posters bearing information on these countries. Jared had expressed a wish to 'represent' Sweden, but that was already taken, so we worked on Finland. He completed the poster! However, whenever I had the opportunity I inserted some math or physics (with math) talk into our session. For example, today we discussed at length Newton's laws (specifically, inertia) and how they apply to cars.
Session Minutes
60
Minutes Student Attended
60
Lesson Comments
As I mention in my Lesson Outline, Jared was very, very wired and bouncing of all four walls, and I knew any formal class situation would be out of the question. Hence, we worked on the poster. As in the past, whenever we veer from actual math instruction, I always try to bring some form of math or physics or general science talk just so Jared continues to learn something new even if it is not directly related to that day's syllabus. After working on the poster for some time, Jared actually asked for math instruction!
In preparation for mathematically formalizing Jared's long-term project, we briefly revisited the standard deviation. In conjunction with this, I introduced the concept of 'margin of error', important when dealing with samples. The margin of error is 1 / sqrt(n), where n is the sample size. This ties in with the Law of Large Numbers – i.e. the larger the sample size, the smaller the margin of error. We worked through some examples to illustrate this. We also discussed what other populations we can bring into the project, and Jared had some excellent ideas.
Assignment
Start collecting more data
Session Minutes
60
Minutes Student Attended
60
Lesson Comments
Again, Jared worked very efficiently via Skype! Almost more so than when he's physically present in class. But I still prefer seeing him in person :)
Today Jared started tabulating the data he collected on baseball players' birthdays using Excel. He already has a very good handle on the mechanics of Excel, so I'm sure it will not be difficult for him to apply what he's learning on data collecting and handling datasets to Excel. Jared tabulated the numbers on two teams, and already started experimenting with different bar graphs to test the optimum way to visualize the data.
Session Minutes
45
Minutes Student Attended
45
Lesson Comments
Jared appears to be quite excited to work in this project, and he said as much. I'm still trying to slowly plant the seed in his head that he could one day present his work to the school as a PowerPoint presentation.... I still have some work to do on the latter...!
She wanted to feel more confident with the information we went through last week, so I gave her some random examples where she had to identify the situation, the method, then solve.
She has an exam coming up on confidence intervals for population parameters, and wasn't sure what she was doing. We went through each case, how to identify each case, and the method to use based on the case.
