Work stories!
Dec. 6th, 2019 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sorcyressSo my boss comes to me and she says "you know how there's been a clusterfuck of classes for next year? It got clustier. Anyways, upside, would you be able to run a year long course of "Data Analysis 1" and "Data Analysis 2"? Kthx"
(Heavily paraphrased. For reference, I am currently doing a single semester of Data Analysis, in the spring.)
Now, the _really really good_ part of all of this is that all these conversations about "what's the schedule gonna be like next year" have this really glaring subtext of "YOU ARE STAYING AT THIS SCHOOL". Which is...fantastic, frankly. It's absolutely the sort of thing that does absolutely zero for my anxietybrain, but is a great thing for my sanebrain to know about.
(anxietybrain is convinced that I will do all this work for some new teacher they hire. Anxietybrain is at least four poops.)
And the more-good-than-bad part of all this is an extended conversation around "let's have a good challenge, and keep doing new things at work!" It turns out that year three is, in some ways, the year things start feeling more like a rut and kinda stuck and just coasting by on the work I did last year (which is not always good enough to coast on). Okay, fine, that's just for my Calc Honors class, which has always been my hardest class to prep for, but still! Getting my brain out and into new curriculum is, theoretically, quite good for me!
Also, Data Analysis is a bangin' course. It's probably what I feel most proud of, it leads to a lot of good (somewhat anarchist) conversations about capitalism and the real world, and it's a chance to kick ass at some project based learning.
But the Data Analysis class I teach is loowww on math. We do lots of math related things --reading graphs, mean-median-mode, a very basic statistical distribution-- but we do not do like...stats. Like any stats. My student population is blissfully unaware of what a p-value is, and that's really the right fit for where they are, mathematically and academically.
And I've stretched it into a semester, maybe a semester-plus-six-weeks, but that's...that's not two semesters. Not yet. So it's very possible that I'm going to be spending some Serious Summer Time working on creating at _least_ a bare-bones curriculum, and hopefully even making some...actual lessons. For actual teaching.
(Big plus side there: sweet dollarbucks)
But wow, despite all the work I might be looking at, despite the fact that God I Hate Change1 And This Is A Lot Of It, despite...despite, I am finding myself to be pretty excited actually. And, in classic ADHD fashion, my hyperfocus has latched onto this Great Thing To Work On, which would be _awesome_ except that WOW I HAVE AN EVIDENCE FILE DUE IN A WEEK, WANNA DO THAT INSTEAD PLEASE?
Still the dream job. Increasingly "the dream job in spite of all the bullshit" but still dream job.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Okay, technically what it is is "sudden, unexpected change". My mental damages are just such that I can get _really_ off-balance and upset (super exacerbated by hunger or tired) if things Don't Go Like They Were Supposed To. This change is not actually bothering me at all, mostly because it's being presented to me like six months before I'd have to do anything at all with the information. Six months is a long time to get used to something. I've got this!
(Heavily paraphrased. For reference, I am currently doing a single semester of Data Analysis, in the spring.)
Now, the _really really good_ part of all of this is that all these conversations about "what's the schedule gonna be like next year" have this really glaring subtext of "YOU ARE STAYING AT THIS SCHOOL". Which is...fantastic, frankly. It's absolutely the sort of thing that does absolutely zero for my anxietybrain, but is a great thing for my sanebrain to know about.
(anxietybrain is convinced that I will do all this work for some new teacher they hire. Anxietybrain is at least four poops.)
And the more-good-than-bad part of all this is an extended conversation around "let's have a good challenge, and keep doing new things at work!" It turns out that year three is, in some ways, the year things start feeling more like a rut and kinda stuck and just coasting by on the work I did last year (which is not always good enough to coast on). Okay, fine, that's just for my Calc Honors class, which has always been my hardest class to prep for, but still! Getting my brain out and into new curriculum is, theoretically, quite good for me!
Also, Data Analysis is a bangin' course. It's probably what I feel most proud of, it leads to a lot of good (somewhat anarchist) conversations about capitalism and the real world, and it's a chance to kick ass at some project based learning.
But the Data Analysis class I teach is loowww on math. We do lots of math related things --reading graphs, mean-median-mode, a very basic statistical distribution-- but we do not do like...stats. Like any stats. My student population is blissfully unaware of what a p-value is, and that's really the right fit for where they are, mathematically and academically.
And I've stretched it into a semester, maybe a semester-plus-six-weeks, but that's...that's not two semesters. Not yet. So it's very possible that I'm going to be spending some Serious Summer Time working on creating at _least_ a bare-bones curriculum, and hopefully even making some...actual lessons. For actual teaching.
(Big plus side there: sweet dollarbucks)
But wow, despite all the work I might be looking at, despite the fact that God I Hate Change1 And This Is A Lot Of It, despite...despite, I am finding myself to be pretty excited actually. And, in classic ADHD fashion, my hyperfocus has latched onto this Great Thing To Work On, which would be _awesome_ except that WOW I HAVE AN EVIDENCE FILE DUE IN A WEEK, WANNA DO THAT INSTEAD PLEASE?
Still the dream job. Increasingly "the dream job in spite of all the bullshit" but still dream job.
~Sor
MOOP!
1: Okay, technically what it is is "sudden, unexpected change". My mental damages are just such that I can get _really_ off-balance and upset (super exacerbated by hunger or tired) if things Don't Go Like They Were Supposed To. This change is not actually bothering me at all, mostly because it's being presented to me like six months before I'd have to do anything at all with the information. Six months is a long time to get used to something. I've got this!
no subject
on 2019-12-07 03:12 am (UTC)Good luck with the evidence file!
Bug me to check whether my employer (a) has done any projects on developing data analysis curricula, or alternatively (b) might need a consultant for such in the future.
no subject
on 2019-12-08 02:02 am (UTC)So, with the disclaimer that you obviously know your students better than I do, here's a heap of disorganized thoughts about turning it into a two semester class. My tentative guess that if you had a whole other semester, and they are currently talking about mean median and mode, then understanding p-values and z-scores should be doable given a lot of time and care. Maybe also do a tiny bite with Bayes's theorem, which over a finite distribution (say balls in an earn) isn't too bad?
It might also be good to talk about things like sampling bias, survivorship bias, and other ways where data can go wrong (especially because then one can talk about the totally kickass ways Abraham Wald used these sorts of thing to help fight the Nazis). That said, one thing that worries me slightly about classes like this is that when we teach people basic problems with statistics or issues with how stats are gathered, people often seem to apply them selectively, worrying about those issues if they don't like a statistic, but not thinking that about those issues when they do like what it has to say. So this might be a good opportunity to talk about cognitive biases in general, which also might help and might be useful to them in general? There's a really good book Jordan Ellenberg's "How Not to Be Wrong" which might be interesting to use either as a textbook or as an inspiration for some of the relevant topics and how to approach them.