Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Holy Crap. They knew something.

I was doing a lab based off of this website. Using the website, kids were acting like birds, eating peppered moths in the original and polluted England forest. Having fun. Not being jerk wads.

Then, after collecting the data for various trials, I asked them to find the measures of central tendency. I had even printed a page examples on how to find each one. To my utter surprise and bewilderment.... MOST OF THEM KNEW EXACTLY HOW TO DO IT!

Oh my god.

It was amazing.

There were only 3-4 kids who had absolutely no clue what they were doing!! AMAZING!

Despite the fact that I am beside myself with happiness, what does it say about Arizona education when I am tickled pink that my 8th graders can do 6th grade math?

And what did it say that even after written and modeled EXPLICIT directions....they still could not produce bar graphs?

Arizona, we have some serious work to do. But thank you for teaching my kids mean, median, mode, range and outlier.