Plan for the day –
- answer questions about course to date, in preparation for Tuesday’s exam.
- talk about first past the post and runoff with an artificial example (not red/blue since I don’t want to mix in my politics).
- talk about proportional representation using the article from Montreal
Observations on recent hw:
- Some have learned not to write out all the digits the calculator tells them …
- Reading is at least as much a problem as mathematics. They don’t read the questions, and they don’t read the answers they write down …
What happened … a very interesting class.
Started with an artificial three option ballot to illustrate first-past-the-post (which allows a nonmajority winner) and then runoff. The word “plurality” was new to most, to my surprise.
Then began the Quebec vote piece. Reading it a paragraph at a time, alternating the real numbers in the article with small made up examples to illustrate the principles worked really well. I might try to write a big chunk of the chapter that way. I think they really grasped proportional representation.
Along the way I was able to work in gerrymandering, majority-minority, hybrid, percentage points, …
Working backwards to vote percentages from the article’s hypothetical seat distribution was particularly effective when we found the actual percentages later in the article.
I have an anonymous critiques of the class (should this go in the book? was it interesting? worth time spent even though it’s not on the exam?) I will look at and report on.
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