Education, Math, and More with Mr. Allison

Thank you to all the brave men and women who answered the call and paid the ultimate sacrifice and to those with an empty seat at the table because of it.

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...

 From a letter to Abigail, 1775. "It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."  Education matters!

 The Land of Opportunity. That's what I always considered our country. I was taught that I could be anything I wanted if I was willing to work hard enough. I've made a good living as a blue collar worker--driving a truck and as a chicken farmer. I've also made decent as a teacher in the white collar world.  As a kid, I never really saw myself going to college. I never thought I'd need it, that I could do whatever I wanted without spending the time and money for school. I went for a year right after high school because a lot of people expected me to, but I only lasted a year. I didn't flunk out, but I spent all my money and as a student I was less-than-stellar enough to lose my tuition scholarship.  So I went back to what I knew best, hard work. And I was good at it. After 17 years bouncing around from the Marine Corps to driving a truck to raising chickens and cattle, God made clear to me that He was calling me to teach. I tried to convince Him He was wrong, but fai...

  Students going into 8th through 12th grades will soon be choosing which classes to take next year. Many of these students have no idea what they will do when they get out of school. Some who think they know will change their minds at least once before they graduate. Many of these students are also being told by friends, family, and maybe even some educators, to take the easy way, not to push themselves, not to challenge themselves. Here's some unsolicited advice. Take it or leave it. If there's any chance you might enter a STEM field after high school (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics), take all the math and science you can get. Don't stop taking math and science classes because you passed the bare minimum number of classes to graduate. If you do, those college level science and math classes are going to bury you. Even if you don't think you're going to college, take college prep courses, regardless where your interests lie. They'll require you to...

  Unpopular opinion. We've been making up snow days as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, I remember going to school on Saturday. I remember going past the last scheduled day. I remember lengthened school days, all to make up time lost to snow days. One thing we know for sure. Very few kids ever learned anything on AMI days. Heck, our school would not allow teachers to cover any new material for the same number of days we missed when kids came back from AMI days so they could catch up on the work they were supposed to do on AMI days! (Yes. What was the point of AMI days?) We also know that practically everyone bemoaned the fact that AMI days meant no more real snow days, even though most kids didn't do a lick of work while they were gone on AMI days. We KNOW these things! Now people are complaining that we have to make up the days. (Even though most schools have snow days built into their calendars and don't even know yet exactly how many days will be made up.) Now p...

She loved the snow. If she were alive today, she'd be loving this. But 13 years ago today, her life was taken by a drunken, stoned 19-year-old at a party. Teens drinking and using illegal drugs ended the life of Amanda, only four days before she would have turned 18, only four months before she would have graduated from high school. I knew she was partying. I knew she was doing things she shouldn't have been doing. I chalked them up to a teen phase that she would grow out of. She never go the chance to grow out of it. Many teens believe they're immune from harm. Amanda did. She thought she could handle whatever came at her. It's a real phenomenon, a sense of invincibility, a sense of immortality even. If you're a teen, please read the story of Amanda and realize that you're not invincible, and certainly not immortal. Alcohol and other mind-altering drugs may seem fun. Five minutes before Amanda was shot and killed, five minutes before, she texted a friend and sa...

We have a three day weekend in honor of the great civil rights activist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. No high school basketball games last night, and no peewee games for us today. So I had a little time to play around. A friend of mine gets voter registration information from the Secretary of State every month. He shares the Faulkner County, Arkansas data with me whenever I ask. I'm extremely grateful, and it gives me an opportunity to practice the data science skills I gained when I was tasked with teaching a data science course a couple of years ago. In addition to teaching, I serve as the elected Justice of the Peace for Faulkner County District 3. This year I don't have an opponent, but every two years, I'm up for reelection, and I'm sure the day is coming when I will run against an opponent. The office of JP isn't one that garners tons of donations, so my campaigns are mostly self-funded. I'm not a rich man, so stretching the dollars I sink into running for a...

Unless you're an educator who's been on a deserted island, you've probably been included in some sort of "research-based" school improvement plan. If you're lucky, you and your colleagues were included in the decision making process for how to implement that plan. Maybe you were even asked for input before it was decided. Many aren't so lucky. You've surely heard of John Hattie's research. His rankings of influences and their "effect sizes" allegedly provide teachers a list of strategies ordered by how effective they are for producing student growth. An effect size of 0.4 is said to represent a year's worth of learning growth. Strategies with an effect size greater than 0.4 suggest the strategy produces more than a year's growth. Effect sizes less than 0.4 indicate the strategy does not produce a full year's growth over the course of a year. The larger the effect size, the more effective that strategy is for producing academic...

 

 The time has come for the second issue of my Arkansas High School Rankings. You may recall last year I ranked schools using demographic data and average ACT Composite scores from 232 Arkansas high schools to create a model that produced a predicted average ACT Composite score for each high school. The 232 schools were then ranked by the difference between their actual average and predicted average. The highest ranking school beat its predicted average by a larger amount than any other high school.  CLICK HERE TO SEE FULL LIST OF RANKED HIGH SCHOOLS The Arkansas Department of Education (ADE) released the Arkansas School Report Cards a few weeks ago. Since then I've been working to produce rankings for the 2022-2023 school year. I will give a brief overview of this year's results in this post. You can view the detailed report of the philosophy, methodology, and analysis behind the rankings here , and see the Jupyter Notebook with the code here. Recall, this model does not ran...

  Most of my students are juniors and seniors who take the ACT college admissions test. In 2019, I sat for the ACT for the first time since 1984, the only time I'd ever taken it before. I did so because our school is partly judged on our students' ACT scores. I'd been tasked over the years several times to teach ACT prep classes, but I was taking for granted the materials I was handed really prepared them. I sat for the exam to see for myself what it was really like. When I sat in 2019, I saw just how different the ACT questions are written from the way they are on a typical high school math exam. That summer, I rewrote all my assessments and my assignments for my College Algebra and Pre-Calculus classes as ACT-style questions. My philosophy is test them on the material they are learning, but get them used to the way they're tested on this high-stakes exam while you're doing it. I don't have access to the data for a rigorous analysis, but anecdotal evidence sugg...

 They're not necessarily ghost towns, but maybe a modern day version of ghost towns. Rural America is dotted with near-dead towns and communities. Once bustling town squares are now a ragtag collection of vape shops, tobacco stores, and second-hand thrift stores. The ruins of buildings that once housed successful small businesses stand dilapidated next to the new bright shiny Dollar General. Next to nothing is produced here. Most of what is consumed comes from miles away. Small towns that decades ago were almost fully self-supporting are barely surviving on a an IV of government handouts.  It's not a new phenomenon, but one that has been getting worse and worse for decades. Towns close enough to metro areas became bedroom communities for their large neighbors, but opportunity eludes those communities more distant. Rural America has been dying for a long time, kept on life support by a dwindling few who refused to leave. Those few commute long distances to make enough money to ...