Knubs' Teaching Adventures

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Can we move this to New Testing so I can update it next semester with my adventures?

[Questor]

What specific grade level are you looking at?

I am leaning towards elementary school to attempt to get children interested in math early on. Three of the classes I take next semester with my school's program involve actual hands on teaching in elementary, middle, and high school. If I enjoy one more than the rest, I will possibly go that route. The final class I take in the program is apprenticeship. All I do is teach.

I'm pretty sure that most elementary systems use a single teacher for all subjects.

There might be pull-out math specialists in some places, but they get much more common (in fact they become mandatory) in secondary.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Bumping for new info:

Class begins next week and I should be teaching some school kids very soon. I look forward to it.

I am leaning towards elementary school to attempt to get children interested in math early on. Three of the classes I take next semester with my school's program involve actual hands on teaching in elementary, middle, and high school. If I enjoy one more than the rest, I will possibly go that route. The final class I take in the program is apprenticeship. All I do is teach.

I'm pretty sure that most elementary systems use a single teacher for all subjects.

There might be pull-out math specialists in some places, but they get much more common (in fact they become mandatory) in secondary.

This is correct. I'll be certified for grades 6-12.

[Oxymoron]

How does this fit with your current health situation ?

[Agent Bert Macklin]

How does this fit with your current health situation ?

"Attend class everyday until something drastic happens. If maintaining good grades is unlikely in the event of a health disaster, withdraw completely and make sure it won't affect my GPA, my transcripts, and future financial aid."

Ps. In fall 2010 this happened, and there was no way the school would work with me getting the Ws off my transcript. It created financial aid probation and I had to appeal it to get the Pell Grant.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

I found out today that before I take the apprenticeship teaching course, I'll have to take two rigorous math exams to become certified (http://www.gace.nesinc.com/)

Also, I will have a total of six lessons that I'll teach this term. Three in an elementary school and three in a middle school. I really look forward to that. I will break the ice with a joke about my hand to get that issue out of the way. Why? Middle school kids are douches.

Finally, I was notified by one of my professors that we are encouraged to purchase liability insurance because Georgia has no school unions and this field is quite fucked in the "you can be thrown out" department.

[uraniun235]

good luck, i sincerely hope you aren't hit with budget cuts

At least with HS some of the students might be somewhat mature.

What in the hell world are you living in?

honestly i remember high school being the time when a lot of my classmates chilled out and were less wild and abusive, it was middle school that was hellish

[Count Chocula]

Teaching basic arithmetic to kids with the attention span of ferrets on pixie sticks. For a whole career. Truly this is a match made in heaven. If you can do it without going insane, good for you!

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Thanks, Chocs. The long term goal is to eventually teach at a community college as they are an excellent tool to giving people second chances,. I wouldn't be where I'm at without them.

[Count Chocula]

CC is a damn good route, saved me a ton of money. Plus you get to teach cool stuff like calc an d MA if it's a good district.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

I hope your student teaching semester is less hellish than mine was. Loved the Calc classes, but the kids in Geometry were mentally middle schoolers with the proportionate strength and speed of a spider teenager.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

I will be teaching third graders for my elementary school education course.

[Bob the Gunslinger]

I've only ever subbed third grade classes maybe a half-dozen times, but it seems like they really, really need you to be fair and consistent (which is really impossible since you can't see everything) or they go nuts. It might help to find out the teacher's routine from last semester and follow that as closely as possible until they get used to you. Also, caffeine.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

I told Flagg this the other day, but while devising truth tables in my discrete mathematics course, I think I determined that Politfiact can be mathematically proven to be horseshit in many instances. Something can't be mostly true, half true, or half false when using the conjunction "and". Something can't be true AND false, which is what those "half" and "mostly" imply. If you make a claim that has a true aspect and a false one, it can't be half true. Here's a table from the textbook.

Truth table for p Ʌ (and) q



Look at it this way. Let's say we have the following statement: My name is Jeff AND I have two full hands. Let p = My name is Jeff" and q = "and I have two full hands."

Apply those to the table.

If both p and q are True, then the statement is True.
If if p is True and q is False, then the statement is False.
If p is False and q is True, then the statement is also False.
If both p and q are False, then the statement is once again False.

[Kryten]

Are you sure you can actually consider those to be aspects of the same claim rather than simply two separate claims? The claims in your own statement don't seem to be actually connected, for example.

[RyanThunder]

They'd have to say 'or' for that to be the case.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Kryten: The AND combines them into one. The books says this: "For the statement 'John is tall and Jim is redheaded' to be true, both components must be true. So for the statement to be false, one or both components must be false."

Indeed, Ryan. Or separates the claim.

[RyanThunder]

Not to be confused with "xor" which would be like saying "either A or B, but not both"

[Infinity Biscuit]

It may not be sound from a programming or logical standpoint, but for most people, if half the listed statements are true, then the thing would in fact be half true. "And" being more of a separator of clauses than a logical statement.

[Agent Bert Macklin]

It may not be sound from a programming or logical standpoint, but for most people, if half the listed statements are true, then the thing would in fact be half true. "And" being more of a separator of clauses than a logical statement.

Politfact grounds their verdicts on logic, though. They even break down their procedure for each claim they analyze.

[Dooey Jo]

ps. breaking down a claim into a set of boolean values and operators to determine how well it agrees with various facts may be a category error

[Oxymoron]

Wouldn't political "facts" be better modeled through the use of Floating Point Values or even Matrices than through Boolean Values ?

[RyanThunder]

how would you model them with matrices?

(or are you just kidding around and my humour detector is failing e_e)

[Oxymoron]

Joking around the fact that "facts" tend to be more complex than simple sets of true/false values.

As for matrices, my understanding of them are a bit fuzzy (never got the occasion to study them academically), but AFAIK they are a way to symbolize sets of polynomial equations, right ? So the simile would be that you'd have this set of equations representing your "fact" system, and you'd be trying to solve the different values through magic SCIENCE !!!

[Agent Bert Macklin]

Joking around the fact that "facts" tend to be more complex than simple sets of true/false values.

As for matrices, my understanding of them are a bit fuzzy (never got the occasion to study them academically), but AFAIK they are a way to symbolize sets of polynomial equations, right ?

In my linear algebra class, we're currently working with systems of linear equations and tying them into matrices. Ex:

The numbers in parenthesis are subscripts.

Code: Select all

Linear equations:

  x(1) - 5x(2) + 4x(3) = -3

 2x(1) - 7x(2) + 3x(3) = -2

-2x(1) +  x(2) + 7x(3) = -1


This would be the following in matrices notation, excluding the brackets because I don't want to open Photoshop. 

 1    -5     4     -3

 2    -7     3     -2

-2     1     7     -1