Today Dom and I went to the annual AMTNJ Conference. As usual, we arrived early at 7:15am, and two of the talks I attended were very interesting. One of them discussed statistics about whether taking an AP Calculus class helps entering freshmen at Rutgers with their math courses there. While I question some of the speaker’s conclusions, the statistics did show that students who take the AP exam do considerably better in college mathematics than college students who did not do so, including those students who take an AP Calculus course without taking the exam. What he has apparently not considered is whether this is causation (if a student studies hard enough to take the AP exam it carries over to college math) or association (students good enough to take the AP exam naturally do better in college as well). But it was interesting.

Since I got home from the conference, I have been catching up on some school work. That is good since tomorrow I am giving 3 tests, so I will be busy grading them this weekend and will not have time to do many other school-related chores as well.

For some unexplainable reason, my back is bothering me a lot the past 2 days, after being really good since school started. Since July I have been doing nightly exercises faithfully which are supposed to strengthen my abdomen, and my back as a result, so I am disappointed at this flareup. My instinctive fear is that my back will get as bad as it did last year when I missed an entire week of school. Hopefully not.