Today was a mixed bag of, well, weirdness and frustration with some awesomeness.
I will start with the awesomeness. This morning at 7:15am, a learner from last year walked in and asked for help with his college math class. Loved it. I worked with him for about an hour (into the first class of the day) and he left feeling much better about his class and caught up. I felt really good about being able to continue to help my learners even after they have graduated and moved on.
The frustration was that classes can be so very very different. My one period is chatty. And by chatty I mean so talkative they actually miss out on some of the lesson because they just won’t learn to listen. They are great learners, but the social aspect is killing them. Meanwhile my other two classes have exactly the opposite problem. They are so un-chatty that they sit there in silence waiting for someone to speak up.
The classes were so polar opposite today, and I was completely flummoxed by it. I need to get the one class to talk about the math, and the other classes I need to get to talk about the math! Well, at least it is a common problem.
Finally, the weirdness. I gave my AP Stats class this lesson. Ch 4 – Tomato plant experiment But today we were learning how to calculate the fences for outliers and we applied the calculation to data set E.
The NSpire says the data point 20.2 is an outlier, as does the TI-84. But using the 5 number summary and doing 1.5(IQR) + Q3 and Q1-1.5(IQR) we get a fence of 19.95.
The value o 20.2 is not an outlier, but the graphing calculators call it an outlier. That is weird. I used JMP hoping it would give me different values for the 5 number summary. Nope. Same as the graphing calculators.
This is some weirdness I can’t easily explain, but it did hammer home the idea we should not trust the calculator.