Now that spring break is in the rear window for most of us, the final quarter is beginning and our attention turns to the beginning of the end. Teachers all over New York and around the country are working in completely remote, hybrid, and completely in person settings, with challenges that go along with each. We want to give a shout out to all of the teachers who have worked so hard throughout this very trying year to do best by their students. We are happy to do our part with new resources.
Although we have finished adding resources for our middle school courses for this year, we are busy planning for next year. Tentatively, we are looking to add a second round of unit assessments, exit tickets, and Spanish language resources to our N-Gen Math middle school line of texts starting in August of 2021.
In Common Core Algebra I this month we bring you the Unit 11 Assessments in Spanish (Forms A through C). We also bring you an enrichment lesson for Unit 10 (Statistics). The lesson is on the Mean Absolute Deviation (or MAD). This is a wonderful topic that can be taught prior to the standard deviation as a more intuitive way to measure the amount of variability in a data set. Interestingly, the topic of the MAD is an integral part of the Common Core middle school statistics program in many states outside of New York.
For Common Core Geometry, this month we have new resources for Unit 9 (Circle Geometry). This is a long unit, and we begin by bringing you the Form B of the mid-unit quiz. This quiz is 3 pages long, so nearly as long as a test, and covers 8 lessons in the unit. We also bring you the Form D Unit Assessment for Unit 9.
In Common Core Algebra II, we have three new contributions to Unit 12 (Probability). First, we have an additional set of problems on conditional probability, entitled Additional Conditional Probability Problems. Conditional probability can be very challenging for students and this problem set gives them many chances to work with the conditional probability formula as well as other probability concepts. We also bring you a mid-unit quiz for this unit that has both a Form A and a Form B.
Finally, in Algebra 2 with Trigonometry, this month we bring you a mid-unit quiz, Form A and Form B, for Unit 12 (Statistics).
There is a lot happening in math education, especially in New York State right now. It turns out that even though we’ve had a crazy year of schooling with most students around the state receiving well less instructional time than they normally would, the federal government is still insisting that New York administer standardized tests. At this point, the only high school math exam that will be given is the New York State Algebra I Regents exam on the morning of June 23rd. We are tentatively planning on having live reviews for this exam on three separate dates, likely 6/8, 6/15, and 6/22. We will go over questions from old Algebra I Regents exams, organized by topic. The three sessions will cover different problems and will likely be around 1.5 hours each.
In other HUGE news in New York, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) has decided to put off the implementation of the Next Generation Mathematics Learning Standards for yet another year. As many of you know, we have already released and schools are already using our Next Generation aligned Math 6 through Math 8 courses. We will be finishing the first edition of N-Gen Math Algebra I this coming fall and winter and still plan to release it for use in the 2022-2023 school year, even though New York will not officially switch over until the 2023-2024 school year. If you haven’t see the new timeline chart yet, it is somewhat shocking:
The link to the timeline is below:
We will share more thoughts on how this effects our programs and products in a future post. For now, just soak it in if you are a teacher in New York state. Have a great rest of your April.