framlingem

Is it a bad thing that I have had "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" on repeat for the last half-hour? I just can't help it. The Devil's fiddle solo give me chills (it _sounds_ unholy, damnit) (er... no pun intended), and Johnny's solo makes me feel like I'm dancing even though I'm not.

Stats tutoring went really well today. My student asked me to go over z-scores with her again, and I wrote out several nice clean pictures of illustrated notes, with examples, for her, getting her to explain to me what I was doing as I did it. We also practiced converting word problems about average rainfall and other things which had no relevance for her into terms that she could visualise and use - average marks out of ten on an exam, usually, or student enrollment over time, or other educational bits. I think she's got it down, but I'll ask her a few questions next time just to make sure it's gone into long-term storage.

We also did linear regression (really basic, straight two-dimensional), and I left her some homework for that, as well as notes.

She told me I'm good at explaining things. I got all warm and fuzzy inside, because this is a lady who's been a teacher herself for the best part of thirty years, if not longer, and she's damn good at it. It's like ... oh, Roger Waters telling me I can write poetry, or Keith Nicol telling me my tele stance is good. Compliments about something you're doing from someone whose work in that field you admire always mean a lot. 'Swhy my favourite autograph ever is from Welwyn Wilton Katz, who signed a book "to Emily, who is a Real Writer".

I'm teaching again tonight, and this is the session I'm most worried about. We've got down mean, median, mode, different ways of figuring out each, plotting data on a graph (she can even tell which is the dependant and which is the independant variable!), sum of X, sum of Y, and sum of (X minus the mean).

Today, though, we're tackling variation and standard deviation, which is as tough as the math gets in basic statistics. Argh. I'm nervous as heck, and I'm having trouble thinking up analogies and metaphors which will use education examples (when calculating mean, median and mode, we used marks out of ten on an assignment, for instance.). The best one I've come up with so far is keys dropped in a parking lot. Variance is the measure of how far away from the car your keys are likely to be, and the standard deviations are like parking spaces - your keys are more likely to be in the parking space right next to the car than the ones three spaces away from the car. (Where the car is the arithmetic mean.) I know she can do it - she's capable of each individual bit of information for getting the right answer, she just needs to understand how to stick them into the equation. Which means knowing what the equation _means_.

This woman taught me when I was in preschool. She's not actually a B.Ed., but she's been teaching for longer than I've been alive. I really want to do a good job with this, because as a teacher she'll be able to see right through my strategies. On the other hand, though, she's got a lot of really good teaching tools. Granted, they're designed to teech 3-5yr olds, but you can do a LOT with blocks and lego men.