Minutiae
I saw a guy in the neighborhood today walking his dogs in a rather unique way: with a motorcycle.
We live on a small, quiet, dead-end street. This guy was zipping up and down the block on his cycle, with his dogs chasing him along the sidewalk. And those dogs were having a grand time, to all appearances. Of course, they were black labs. Labradors have a great time doing anything.
It looked like great exercise for a couple of cooped-up dogs. Probably not so much for the owner, though.
--
So rookie shortstop Troy Tulowitzki of the Colorado Rockies had an unassisted triple play in a game against the Braves over the weekend. Click over to the page, watch the video clip and listen to the play by play. It's fun.
An unassisted triple play has only happened thirteen times in Major League Baseball history. And now Colorado is a part of that history.
It's sad, really. May 1st, and the best of the Rockies' season is already behind them. ::sigh::
--
Sports fans, reason with me for a second here. If there are eight teams from your conference / division / league going to the playoffs, and your team is seeded fourth, doesn't that mean you should have home field advantage? The answer, of course, is "yes". Except in the National Basketball Association.
In both conferences, the #5 seed had a better record than the #4 seed (Chicago over Miami, Houston over Utah). Utah and Miami were both allotted the #4 seed, since they had both won their divisions. But since the #5's had better records, they got the home court nod.
My question: If you have to open a playoff series on the road, doesn't that make you the de facto lower seed?
This whole mess grew out of the fact that the Dallas Mavericks—who are currently the #1 seed and one game away from watching the rest of the playoffs from their sofas—had the second-best record in the West last year (or was it the year before?) but were relegated to the #4 seed because they hadn't won the division. So it was decided that the top three seeds would not automatically go to division winners, but that a division winner could be seeded no lower than 4th. However, the home court advantage would still go to the team with the better record.
If the goal is to reward teams with better records, why lock division winners in at all? If a team wins their division but has the conference's 7th best overall record, seed them 7th and be done with it. Don't call them a #4 and then make them play on the #5's home court the first two nights. That's stupid.
--
The rant above should not be interpreted to mean that I've given up on my time-honored mantra of "It's hard for me to care about basketball during hockey season." That's not the case at all. But with my Avalanche becoming this season the winningest team in NHL history not to make the playoffs, I'm a little distracted.
In the absence of my favorite team, I'm inclined to root for the Buffalo Sabres, the Vancouver Canucks, and the Ottawa Senators. For the latter two teams, I'm rooting for the sake of tradition. No Canadian team has won Lord Stanley's Cup since the 1992-93 Montreal Canadiens. It's time for the Cup to go back North, eh? As for Buffalo, I still think they got hosed in the 1999 "Creased lightning" incident against Dallas. They're due.
Of course, I could also root for San Jose, at least in this round. Because they're playing against Detroit. And my two favorite NHL teams, as I've said many times before, are the Avalanche and whoever's playing the Red Wings.
--
I was teaching three Algebra II classes last week. They'd had a series of review days to prepare for an upcoming standardized test. The 1st and 3rd period classes looked like they were preparing for it pretty intently. The 4th period class, however, was just blowing it off. So I was inspired to put together a pop quiz to get their attention.
The quiz included 6 problems, all taken verbatim from the worksheet we'd gone over in class the day before. It was worth 40 points, with a 5-point bonus question: "Where did your teacher get these problems from?"
The results were interesting:
Overall high score: 44
Overall low score: 6
Overall average: 25
1st period average: 27
3rd period average: 28
4th period average: 17
That's right, on a quiz where all the problems had been given to them two days before as homework, the 4th period class averaged well under 50%. Note that the average score of 17 includes the 5 bonus points for about a third of the students—which is to say that about two-thirds of them didn't even look at the homework enough to recognize the problems, two of which I even did on the board for the class, one class period later.
It's also interesting to note that the highest overall score (44) came from a kid in that 4th period class. (He's going to kick himself when he realizes that he dropped that negative sign, I'm pretty sure.) But nobody else in the class was within 15 points of him, and the class average shows it.
You can lead the kids to school, but you can't make 'em think.
We live on a small, quiet, dead-end street. This guy was zipping up and down the block on his cycle, with his dogs chasing him along the sidewalk. And those dogs were having a grand time, to all appearances. Of course, they were black labs. Labradors have a great time doing anything.
It looked like great exercise for a couple of cooped-up dogs. Probably not so much for the owner, though.
--
So rookie shortstop Troy Tulowitzki of the Colorado Rockies had an unassisted triple play in a game against the Braves over the weekend. Click over to the page, watch the video clip and listen to the play by play. It's fun.
An unassisted triple play has only happened thirteen times in Major League Baseball history. And now Colorado is a part of that history.
It's sad, really. May 1st, and the best of the Rockies' season is already behind them. ::sigh::
--
Sports fans, reason with me for a second here. If there are eight teams from your conference / division / league going to the playoffs, and your team is seeded fourth, doesn't that mean you should have home field advantage? The answer, of course, is "yes". Except in the National Basketball Association.
In both conferences, the #5 seed had a better record than the #4 seed (Chicago over Miami, Houston over Utah). Utah and Miami were both allotted the #4 seed, since they had both won their divisions. But since the #5's had better records, they got the home court nod.
My question: If you have to open a playoff series on the road, doesn't that make you the de facto lower seed?
This whole mess grew out of the fact that the Dallas Mavericks—who are currently the #1 seed and one game away from watching the rest of the playoffs from their sofas—had the second-best record in the West last year (or was it the year before?) but were relegated to the #4 seed because they hadn't won the division. So it was decided that the top three seeds would not automatically go to division winners, but that a division winner could be seeded no lower than 4th. However, the home court advantage would still go to the team with the better record.
If the goal is to reward teams with better records, why lock division winners in at all? If a team wins their division but has the conference's 7th best overall record, seed them 7th and be done with it. Don't call them a #4 and then make them play on the #5's home court the first two nights. That's stupid.
--
The rant above should not be interpreted to mean that I've given up on my time-honored mantra of "It's hard for me to care about basketball during hockey season." That's not the case at all. But with my Avalanche becoming this season the winningest team in NHL history not to make the playoffs, I'm a little distracted.
In the absence of my favorite team, I'm inclined to root for the Buffalo Sabres, the Vancouver Canucks, and the Ottawa Senators. For the latter two teams, I'm rooting for the sake of tradition. No Canadian team has won Lord Stanley's Cup since the 1992-93 Montreal Canadiens. It's time for the Cup to go back North, eh? As for Buffalo, I still think they got hosed in the 1999 "Creased lightning" incident against Dallas. They're due.
Of course, I could also root for San Jose, at least in this round. Because they're playing against Detroit. And my two favorite NHL teams, as I've said many times before, are the Avalanche and whoever's playing the Red Wings.
--
I was teaching three Algebra II classes last week. They'd had a series of review days to prepare for an upcoming standardized test. The 1st and 3rd period classes looked like they were preparing for it pretty intently. The 4th period class, however, was just blowing it off. So I was inspired to put together a pop quiz to get their attention.
The quiz included 6 problems, all taken verbatim from the worksheet we'd gone over in class the day before. It was worth 40 points, with a 5-point bonus question: "Where did your teacher get these problems from?"
The results were interesting:
Overall high score: 44
Overall low score: 6
Overall average: 25
1st period average: 27
3rd period average: 28
4th period average: 17
That's right, on a quiz where all the problems had been given to them two days before as homework, the 4th period class averaged well under 50%. Note that the average score of 17 includes the 5 bonus points for about a third of the students—which is to say that about two-thirds of them didn't even look at the homework enough to recognize the problems, two of which I even did on the board for the class, one class period later.
It's also interesting to note that the highest overall score (44) came from a kid in that 4th period class. (He's going to kick himself when he realizes that he dropped that negative sign, I'm pretty sure.) But nobody else in the class was within 15 points of him, and the class average shows it.
You can lead the kids to school, but you can't make 'em think.
posted by Michael at
6:05 PM
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