I Am The Queen Of Data Analysis

[omorka]

Hee hee . . . RPG Office Supplies

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In other news:

Today we had to turn in our calculator sets. There are math tests all three testing days: Exit Level (11th grade) on Tuesday, 10th grade on Wednesday, and 9th grade on Thursday. In all three cases, every student is required to have a graphing calculator for the test. Moreover, the memories of those calculators must be completely cleared before testing starts.

Fortunately, TI makes a handy little program by the name of TestGard, which will clear the memory of a calculator with a single keystroke and even removes the stubborn game applications that the kids add that can't be removed by a manual memory reset. So today after school, every math teacher had to turn in their own calculator set and then help clear the extra school sets.

Now, I had cleared my set yesterday before leaving, since today was a short day (classes ended at 10:45 am) and we weren't going to be using them. I was dreading going up there and finding that no one had done this simple-but-obvious step - and it being assumed by my specialist that I hadn't either. I was somewhat pleasantly surprised - about a third of us had gotten their acts together enough to clear their sets ahead of time. On the other hand, about a third not only hadn't done so, they hadn't even freshened the ID markings on their calculators like RR asked them to do two weeks ago. *sigh* At least I didn't have an "everyone here is incompetent" moment.

I had 5 clear sets (counting mine) in the time it took several of my colleagues to get their own set cleared. I will choose to see this as an example of my l33t calculator skillz rather than as slowness on their part. :)

By the time we got everyone finished, it was too late for me to catch the 11:15 bus, so I hung around and made sure all the cleared calcs were stored away before I left. This had me going down the south-central staircase just in time to see Mrs. G heading back to her office. I had meant to ask her whether she or Mrs. HR is my end-year assessor this year, so I asked her; she couldn't remember either, but she said she'd look it up first thing on Monday if I would remember to e-mail her about it. I said I'd try to remember to e-mail her (I probably will) and started to head back to my room.

She stopped me and said she had something she wanted to ask me about.

I tried to think of anyone I'd managed to piss off in the last couple of weeks and couldn't think of anyone.

She gave me the "big friendly grin" and said that I didn't need to make up my mind about what she was going to tell me right away, that if I needed the weekend or even a little longer to think about it, that she would be fine with that.

Okay, get to the point already . . .

She said the school was putting together a team to look at school-wide data - everything from dropout numbers and patterns through TAKS scores to AP enrollment - and that she'd found a couple of people who would serve as the people-people, communicating the analyses to the people who create and implement policy, but that she needed someone who could actually dig into the numbers themselves, and would I be interested -

I interrupted her and said I'd gladly do it.

She was a little startled that I'd made the decision so fast, I think. She started to repeat herself, and I told her "You have your big-picture people already, and you need a details person who can crunch numbers and interpret data. I'll be more than happy." She seemed pleased that I understood, and told me that she'd asked the specialists and department heads for some recommendations for her number-cruncher for the team - and that my name had come up over and over.

Well, I am the AP Stats teacher, after all. I'm probably the only person in the building - with the possible exception of a few of the science teachers - who knows what a chi-square test is. Honestly, I'd have been a little miffed if my name hadn't come up - but the ego-boost is nice, al the same. :)

Now, I don't know what the mission of the team is yet. It may just be to find numerical justification for decisions that have already been made, and if so I'll be their gadfly all the way. But I tend to think Mrs. G's motives are pure even if her methods tend to suck. This might - might - mean that I may actually get to head off some stupidity at the pass. Who knows? - maybe even draw some attention to our problem areas in ways that have validity just above and beyond my (or her) opinion.



Makes me wanna quote Weird Al:

Wanna run wit my crew, hah?
Rule cyberspace and crunch numbers like I do?
They call me the king of the spreadsheets
Got 'em printed out on my bedsheets

Comments

Apart from using 733t sp33k...

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

That's cool. It's great to have a niche.

Do ya think Borealis is good with details like that, or is she more of a gestalt level thinker?

Re: Apart from using 733t sp33k...

[omorka.livejournal.com]

This is one of the things that changes over time for Borealis.

Alice Zero does both, but she's really better at details. She forces herself to do field-dependent stuff when she has to.

Alice One is field-dependent, and it's her downfall. She does big-picture stuff almost exclusively - in a number of ways, she let Zero do all of her detail work for her. The original Allison is field-independent, also, and to a certain extent, One relies on her for her initial push.

The Alice Twos vary, but they're generally back to Zero's space - they're more field-independent than gestalt thinkers, but they're capable of doing both.

The vast majority of the Alice Threes and all but perhaps one or two Allisons are like me - field-independent to the core. You're familiar with the proverb "can't see the forest for the trees"? If One is a forest person and Zero and the Twos are tree people, then the Threes and Allisons see leaves and needles. In the best of them (in particular in the original Allison and Allison Northcutt), they sort of wrap around to the other side - they see every needle in the entire forest, as well as the relationships between them all, and thus know the forest better than a gestalt person might. Again, this is not as disastrous as it might be, since the Twos and Threes have the gestalt-level instructions that One left, as well as the subconscious suggestions of Alice-In-The-Pit . . .

Needless to say, Borealis Omega has so many consciousnesses that she can do both at once, and does, all the time.

[follybard.livejournal.com]

Heh heh heh. I'm all giggly now, because one of the memories I almost used in the memory meme thingy was the day you brought your brand-spankin'-new copy of "Running With Scissors" to gaming. We laughed 'til it hurt at most of the songs -- including that one. :)