How to Quiet a Class Without Yelling

How to Quiet a Class Without Yelling When you get home from work, do you often feel hoarse from telling the kids to stop talking and exhausted from trying, in vain, to keep your kids on task? Do you fantasize about a quiet classroom in your private moments? Discipline and classroom management are, by far the top battles that you must win in the classroom. Without focused and relatively quiet students, you might as well forget about hard work and significant academic achievement. Believe it or not, it is possible to quiet your students and keep them on task with simple nonverbal routines that save your voice and your sanity. The key here is to get creative and do not expect one routine to work forever. Many times, effectiveness wears off with time; so feel free to rotate through the various methods listed below. Here are some teacher-tested student discipline strategies that meet the objective of maintaining a quiet classroom with ease. The Music Box Buy an inexpensive music box. (Rumor has it that you can find one at Target for approximately $12.99!) Each morning, wind the music box up completely. Tell the students that, whenever they are noisy or off task, you will open the music box and let the music play until they quiet down and get back to work. If at the end of the day, there is any music left, the kids receive some type of reward. Maybe they can earn tickets for a weekly drawing or a few minutes towards end-of-the-week free play time. Be creative and find the perfect no-cost reward that your students will really want to quiet down for. Kids love this game and will quiet down immediately as you reach towards the music box. The Quiet Game   Somehow, when you just add the word game to your request, the kids will generally snap right into line. They get 3 seconds to make as much noise as they want and then, at your signal, they become silent for as long as possible. Students who make noise receive dirty looks and peer pressure to quiet down again. You can set the timer and tell the kids that you going to see how long they can stay quiet this time. You might be surprised at how well this simple technique works! Eye the Clock Each time your students get too loud eye the clock or your watch. Let the students know that whatever time they waste by being noisy, you will subtract from their recess or other free time. This usually works really well because the kids dont want to miss recess time. Keep track of the time lost (down to the second!) and hold the class accountable. Otherwise, your empty threats will soon be discovered and this trick wont work at all. But, once your kids see you mean what you say, a mere glance towards the clock will be enough to quiet them down. This is a great technique for substitute teachers to have in their back pockets! Its quick and easy and will work in any situation! Hands Up Another nonverbal way to quiet your class is to simply raise your hand. When your students see that your hand is raised, they too will raise their hands. Hands up mean stop talking and pay attention to the teacher. As each child notices the cue and quiets down, a wave of hand-raising will envelop the room and you will soon have the whole class attention. A twist on this is to raise your hand and count one finger at a time. By the time you get to five, the class needs to be quietly paying attention to you and your directions. You may want to quietly count to five along with the visual cue of your fingers. Your students will soon get used to this routine and it should be pretty quick and easy to quiet them down. Advice The key to any successful classroom management plan is to think carefully about the goals you want to achieve and act confidently. You are the teacher. You are in charge. If you dont believe this underlying precept wholeheartedly, the kids will sense your hesitation and act on that feeling. Consciously design your discipline routines and teach them explicitly. Students love routines as much as we do. Make your hours in the classroom as productive and peaceful as possible. Both you and the kids will flourish under such circumstances!

The Meaning of Mutually Exclusive in Statistics

The Meaning of Mutually Exclusive in Statistics In probability two events are said to be mutually exclusive if and only if the events have no shared outcomes. If we consider the events as sets, then we would say that two events are mutually exclusive when their intersection is the empty set. We could denote that events A and B are mutually exclusive by the formula A ∠© B Ø. As with many concepts from probability, some examples will help to make sense of this definition. Rolling Dice Suppose that we roll two six-sided dice and add the number of dots showing on top of the dice. The event consisting of the sum is even is mutually exclusive from the event the sum is odd.  The reason for this is because there is no way possible for a number to be even and odd. Now we will conduct the same probability experiment of rolling two dice and adding the numbers shown together. This time we will consider the event consisting of having an odd sum and the event consisting of having a sum greater than nine. These two events are not mutually exclusive. The reason why is evident when we examine the outcomes of the events. The first event has outcomes of 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11. The second event has outcomes of 10, 11 and 12. Since 11 is in both of these, the events are not mutually exclusive. Drawing Cards We illustrate further with another example. Suppose we draw a card from a standard deck of 52 cards. Drawing a heart is not mutually exclusive to the event of drawing a king. This is because there is a card (the king of hearts) that shows up in both of these events. Why Does It Matter There are times when it is very important to determine if two events are mutually exclusive or not. Knowing whether two events are mutually exclusive influences the calculation of the probability that one or the other occurs. Go back to the card example. If we draw one card from a standard 52 card deck, what is the probability that we have drawn a heart or a king? First, break this into individual events. To find the probability that we have drawn a heart, we first count the number of hearts in the deck as 13 and then divide by the total number of cards. This means that the probability of a heart is 13/52. To find the probability that we have drawn a king we start by counting the total number of kings, resulting in four, and next divide by the total number of cards, which is 52. The probability that we have drawn a king is 4/52. The problem is now to find the probability of drawing either a king or a heart. Here’s where we must be careful. It is very tempting to simply add the probabilities of 13/52 and 4/52 together. This would not be correct because the two events are not mutually exclusive. The king of hearts has been counted twice in these probabilities. To counteract the double counting, we must subtract the probability of drawing a king and a heart, which is 1/52. Therefore the probability that we have drawn either a king or a heart is 16/52. Other Uses of Mutually Exclusive A formula known as the addition rule gives an alternate way to solve a problem such as the one above. The addition rule actually refers to a couple of formulas that are closely related to one another. We must know if our events are mutually exclusive in order to know which addition formula is appropriate to use.