framlingem

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.