Simpson's Paradox

It’s been a few months of a rough “temporary” work situation, and I can feel it taking a toll.  I’m starting to slide into slow motion, taking forever to get up, to get out of the shower, to come in from the car, (Not for work particularly, I sat outside the library for a while and I love the library.), it just seems like so much effort to do whatever I’m going to do next.

As this goes longer, checking my online grades has gone from checking on a Monday or a Tuesday to see which of  last week’s assignments have been graded so far, to alt-tabbing over, and over again, to see that my 91% is still there. Grade checking ALL THE TIME. My teacher recently made a graph of student grades, without names, obviously, it’s a stats thing and not a public humiliation tactic, and I have the lowest A in the class.  I also noticed that the student averages make that reverse bell curve so common in adult ed.  (Why is that so common?)

Sometime I’ll write up a cost-benefit analysis of studying for this course, because I’ve noticed that after doing the assigned reading, and looking up a scientific term or two each week, I get a steady B+ on the weekly test. With additional hours of studying, making outlines and detailed notes, I can bring that up to an A-. So I’m either spending 2 hours for an 88% or 6+ hours for a 92%.  Maybe I don’t study in an efficient way (How DO you memorize and contextualize new concepts without an outline? Is there something everyone else knows how to do?) or maybe that’s the class working as intended, and that’s what builds the reverse bell curve in student grades.

In App Design class, I ask my students keep their code statements in groups and name the groups something logical, like Game Controls. For the older kids, sometimes they get a detailed discussion of how good writers choose words to have meaning for the reader, so we have to choose words that are meaningful to the reader. The reader of these words will be the student in the future, and their programming teacher, and while we have the technical ability to put statements in any order and name groups and variables anything we want, future-student will thank you for making it logical and simple.

Anyway, the other day I asked the students to make a new group called Spikes and then to watch carefully and pay attention to our first hero-murdering lesson.

“Do we call this Spikes or Spike’s?” one of my students asked.

“No apostrophe.  Just plain Spikes because it’s plural.”

“Plural?”

“We need more than one spike to scare our hero! And look at the art, look at all those spikes. You just use S for more than one spike. You use the apostrophe when something belongs to something else.”

“Oh,” he turned back to his computer, “That makes sense. I think you could even be an English teacher, Miss Meg.”

Part of my science class involves reading and commenting on other students’ coursework, so the other day I had to read an essay about why the writer would never give up his SUV and how whiny sissy scientists don’t scare him, and how can water vapor be a greenhouse gas, when humans need water to live, so CHECKMATE, CLIMATE CHANGE!

It was just like stumbling into a horrible comments section, only I’m required to read it all, and respond usefully and politely for a grade.

Sometimes when I’m spending an evening doing homework, I question why I signed up for this class or exactly what I hope to get out of it, and my answers change from day to day. But I’m pretty sure it wasn’t this.