Education, Math, and More with Mr. Allison

Some may think the (and students) means I consider student needs secondary behind teachers' needs. Not true. I wrote it like that because most students don't really understand what they NEED most, and what they need most isn't necessarily what they want out of school.  The classroom is different today than it was five years ago. When we sent kids home in 2020 and told them to hide under the covers and we'd give them an A...for doing absolutely nothing...for learning absolutely nothing...for nothing...nothing, when that happened, a shift in expectations occurred. And it hasn't shifted back yet, at least not everywhere. Teachers (and students) need that to shift back, and they need it now! Kids got used to having great grades for doing almost no work. Kids got used to having a high GPA without learning. To make things worse, when they came back in the fall of 2020, we sent them home for two weeks at a time when they heard the word Covid in the hallways. Over and over ...

Here are links to my attempts to solve the released FRQs from the 2024 AP Statistics Exam. I intentionally avoid reading the questions before I sit down to work them. This is so students who stumble on these videos can see that even experienced teachers have to sort through and really think about them, sometimes even making mistakes. The official scoring rubrics for these will not be released until after the reading is concluded sometime this summer. Once those come out, we can come back and score my attempts to see how I would have done if I'd sat for the exam. But for now, here they are. Enjoy, and feel free to comment, even if you think I did something wrong. PS -- Please forgive me in the video for #1. I started working it out before the morning moment of silence and the Pledge of Allegiance.  2024 AP Statistics Released FRQ #1 2024 AP  Statistics  Released FRQ #2 2024 AP  Statistics  Released FRQ #3 2024 AP  Statistics  Released FRQ #4 2024 AP...

 Here are links to my attempts to solve the released FRQs from the 2024 AP Calculus AB Exam. I intentionally avoid reading the questions before I sit down to work them. This is so students who stumble on these videos can see that even experienced teachers have to sort through and really think about them, sometimes even making mistakes. The official scoring rubrics for these will not be released until after the reading is concluded sometime this summer. Once those come out, we can come back and score my attempts to see how I would have done if I'd sat for the exam. But for now, here they are. Enjoy, and feel free to comment, even if you think I did something wrong. PS -- Please forgive me in the video for #1. I started working it out before the morning moment of silence and the Pledge of Allegiance.  2024 AP Calculus AB Released FRQ #1 2024 AP Calculus AB Released FRQ #2 2024 AP Calculus AB Released FRQ #3 2024 AP Calculus AB Released FRQ #4 2024 AP Calculus AB Released FRQ #5...

It's that time of year again in education. The end draws near. At my school, we started the final quarter of this school year last week. A lot of stuff comes with that. Seniors are almost finished, really finished. Everyone--teachers and students--has summer on the mind. Prom, scholarships, letters of recommendation, graduation, testing, and a ton of other stuff that all comes at the end of the school year. Most of it exciting and fun. But not all of it. Some kids are moving after the year ends and may be kind of nervous and anxious about the unknown. Seniors are leaving the world they've known for 13 years and struggle with uncertainty too, even while they're excited about the prospects. Teachers, as relieved as they are to see the light at the end of the tunnel, this can be a stressful time too. Teachers' contracts are year-to-year, so everyone is wondering if they're contract will be renewed. Testing is stressful for teachers too, since results are often tied to ...

Years ago, my wife worked in a factory, where one of her jobs was to verify the hours on employee time cards in the part of the plant where she worked. She told me about a guy who consistently complained about his pay, claiming it wasn't enough to live on. He told her, "If they paid me more, I'd work harder." She tried, to no avail, to explain that his view was exactly opposite the way it actually works, that he would likely be paid more if he worked harder. Unfortunately, many like that guy exist pretty much anywhere you go.  There's an attitude analogous to that fellow's view in education. "If we had more money, we could provide a better education." I've always had a problem with this approach. I've always been of the mind that if we provide a better education, we'll have more money. Why? Because schools and districts that provide a quality education to those they serve will draw parents and students like sugar draws ants. Today, we hav...

In his 2022 book, The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale , economist John List, the Kenneth C. Griffin Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago , defines the Sunk Cost Fallacy as the idea that one must continue to pursue an idea based on money previously invested. The basic idea is that the money previously spent is already gone and no longer recoverable. As humans we have a tendency to feel like that money is wasted if we decide to abandon the effort we spent that money on, even after the project appears doomed for failure. Too often, people continue to pour good money into a failing effort, because they don't want to waste the bad money they've already dumped into it. Teachers are prone to this same fallacy. The year was 2019. I sat for the ACT for the first time since I was a junior in high school, way back in 1984. Thirty five years had passed since the one and only time I'd ever actually SEEN the test. Ov...