The Maze:

Flouting the pirates’ code, raising the black too soon, is as bad as barnacles on the bow. Floating on a virtual Sargasso Sea for a year, among the flotsam of rotting paper’d lesson plans and worksheets, now, I can tack circles around Big Data, but I try to stay off the radar.

My traffic always drops from Day 1 to 2 of my online courses, but consider what happened two days ago, and yesterday:

This is risky, asking you something not about math—what happened yesterday? I felt our class was at least as engaged as Day 1, but metrics strongly diverge from that hypothesis.

Now, we will huddle in shanties, and wander the maze, reporting out ON TIME. Then, we will examine nail penetration and screw holes.

UPDATES!

Boiler Carbon Footprint:

Tree Carbon Footprint:

One of the most important skills you must acquire in the trades is delivering work product in a timely manner. Moving forward, DEADLINES WILL BE STRICTLY ENFORCED.

So our first item today will be gathering in shanties again, this time working on boiler carbon footprints.

Then, we will arrive at our first Real Trades Math problems: the “Are You Smarter than 5th Grader” questions, and the kinds of math applied to a construction site.

Welcome HireNYC Cycle 10!

Roll over Cycle 10 on the top menu, and click on the Zoom link. Everything else you need to know is below the line

When COVID hit, it hit us hard. All of us here, today, know staring at a screen for hours day after day won’t get the job done. The apprenticeship tradition, online, cannot be sustained. When we left our classrooms deux Marches ago, it didn’t sink in that we still not back. By May, it was “sink or swim,” and we never had time to look back. We set sail, did not join the Edmund Fitzgerald, tread the bails of worker education. The ubercrawl drydocked many upgrades, but never wavered from its lodestars:

• student privacy
• individualized learning
• crew jobs
• open evaluations

For the rest of that mind-numbing year, we played defense, first catching up on deliverables suspended while we sheltered in place, watching stacked pine boxes next to the East River. Then, finding a way back to my flow.

Every day for the next two weeks, 2 ½ hours of your life will survey trades math. The protocol, evolved from a raft two Mays ago, to the ubercrawl you just walked the plank onto, will always be the same:

• I model a “mini lesson” for 10-15 minutes.
• You join a shanty crew, together uploading a KwikKwiz™ report. While shantied, I will avail myself of your crew, upon request.
• Then a well warranted Break, during which I will gather Kwik/zs, and report back to the ubercrawl.
  NOTE: deadlines will be adamantly enforced.
• The format will always be the same: Kwik/z, Homework, Midterm, Final.

So let’s taisez vous, and calculate carbon footprints.