Plan for the day – either energy and power, or taxes. I will give them the choice. I predict they’ll choose energy.
We ended up doing neither. Excel review was what was wanted and needed. I worked most of the hybrid vs conventional exercise for the class -= quite usefully, until I couldn’t get Excel to use the first of three columns of data for the x axis in a scatter plot, with the y axis for the values in the second two columns. It kept trying to build three functions using columns as categories.
The teachable moment I couldn’t make happen was to start from “bad things happen” and, using “trust yourself to puzzle this out somehow”, get to a satisfactory conclusion. They are becoming better at realizing that an answer is wrong, but still not good a trusting themselves to work out of the quandary.
I didn’t finish the analysis during class. As it was ending, a student showed me her correct version – it turns out that because the header cells on the two y-columns were merged (for “total cost”) trying to build a chart with header row included confused Excel. If I make the chart without the header row Excel does the right thing (i.e. what I want it to).
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