Statistically Speaking...

"Well I hope this experience hasn't put you off flying. Statistically speaking, it's still the safest way to travel."--Superman

I get tired of hyperbole. When President Obama started sternly lecturing our intelligence agencies for a "systemic failure" in Detroit on Christmas day, I just rolled my eyes. Another politician takes advantage of bad math to make political hay.

This may not be politically correct, but I thought that the Columbine incident was pretty much overhyped, too. This is not to say that the loss of life was not tragic; of course it was. What I'm saying is that we pay far too much attention to tragedies where the loss of life is high because it all happens at the same time. I worked in a school back in the 90s where at least as many students died from gunfire on the way to, from, and even at school, but nothing was ever done or said about it. No national news media covered the violence. No crisis plan was initiated nationwide to prevent the deaths. It wasn't until a lot of people died all at the same time in a school did the idea of bullying or student violence even make the headlines.

Why are plane crashes covered in the news? Because the loss of life all happens at the same time. Superman was right. Statistically speaking, it's still the safest way to travel. It's just that you don't see 300 lives lost all at the same time on highways that makes those kind of accidents not as newsworthy. It's far more dangerous to drive on the highways than to fly, so where is the outrage? Where is the president, sternly lecturing about impaired driving? There are 13,000-14,000 alcohol-related driving deaths per year in the U.S. alone. Someone would have to blow up a whole lot of planes to compare to that, and once again, no I am not saying that those types of deaths are any less tragic. I'm saying that the tragedy of terrorism in the air is a relatively small problem.

I've got a great idea. Why don't we stop spending billions while nickeling and diming air traffic threats and start taking equally bold steps to save as many lives as possible. That would be worth a headline or two.

Happy (Yawn) New Year

You know, I really don't care about New Year's Day. It's just a Hallmark holiday as far as I'm concerned. It's about as exciting as watching my odometer turn over every 10,000 miles and I don't go out and party when that happens, either.

Last night, my wife and I were reminiscing about New Year's in 2000 and how I was a grump when everyone around me was celebrating the new millennium. I said then, as I say now, was it really the new millennium? When you learn to count to 10, do you stop at 9 and say you're done? Do you stop at 99 and go, "Whoopie! I counted to 100?" Seems to me a millennium should be complete when the 1000th year in it is complete, not when the 999th year is at its close. Do people realize that the Gregorian calendar was adopted in different parts of the world at different times? Do they know that to change over from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, 10 days had to be skipped to make it consistent? That's right, when the Gregorian calendar was adopted, the four countries who adopted it first jumped from October 4 to October 15, 1582. This transfer wasn't adopted across the board, though. As each country adopted the new calendar, they had to skip days to catch up with the rest of the world. When Alaska was purchased from Russia by the US in 1867, they had to jump 11 days, repeating one of the days of the week because the International Date Line was moved. Holy Groundhog Day!

I guess my point is that it's not that big a deal to celebrate a new year for me, because it's really a contrived holiday based on math corrections. That said, I think it's kind of fun to whip out old calendars and post them in my classroom. Kids will start freaking out on Monday at school, wondering why the calendar says 1993. That's because 2010's calendar is identical to 1993's. There's even a cool little website, http://whencanireusethiscalendar.com/ that can help you determine when your old calendars can be used again. Just hang on to them. The new year is so unexciting that identical years come back pretty often. I think it's more important to celebrate every day instead of picking some arbitrary point in the Earth's trip around the sun to have fun.

Now, I wonder what they'll think of my Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog calendar in 2021 when I can reuse it?

Math is Hard

"Math class is tough" was the actual phrase that the 1994 Teen Talk Barbie doll uttered, but "Math is hard" will do for our purposes.

I'm crushed over the end of the Detroit Tigers' season this year. The Tigers had a seven-game lead on September 6, and the Minnesota Twins caught them on the 161st game of the season. They remained tied through the last game and had to play a 163rd game on Tuesday, which the Twins won in extra innings, 6-5. The Tigers finished second to the Twins for the third time in four years on the final day of the regular season. It's something to behold, reading fan reaction to the end of the Tigers' season. Words like "collapse" and "choke" dominate the message boards and blogs. But when it comes to actually understanding how baseball works, you have to have a basic understanding of mathematics, which most sports fans apparently don't. Math is hard.

To win a division of Major League Baseball, a team has to win more games than the other teams in the division. It doesn't matter if the games are won and lost in April or October, because they all count the same. I keep reading about how Miguel Cabrera was drunk on the morning of a big game with the White Sox during that final weekend. I don't question that his state of mind was the reason he went 0-for-11 for the series with the White Sox, but I do question that it was a big game. They're all big games. Angry fans are writing that the Tigers went 11-16 after September 6, which was the date of their biggest lead over the Twins. They fail to mention, however, that they were coming off a six-game winning streak in which they swept both the Cleveland Indians and the Tampa Bay Rays. When you take a look at the normal split of September/October, the Tigers were 17-16, above .500. But some people never let facts get in the way of a good story. Math is hard.

To really look at the season objectively, all we have to do is take a good look at July. In July, the Tigers went 10-14, losing no fewer than six games by scoring only one solitary run in each. In five consecutive contests, the Tigers lost by a score of 2-1 in four games. Five relievers from the bullpen lost games in that month. Not only were our starters not getting any run support, but our bullpen couldn't hold leads and we couldn't score late in games when they did get run support. One could easily argue that the season was lost more in July than October, but it would be lost on the media and angry fans. Why? Math is hard.

If the Tigers had won any one game that they lost during the season, there wouldn't even have been a one-game playoff in the Metrodome. Any one misplay gets fielded cleanly leading to a loss, or any swing and miss on a hanging curveball that a batter should have knocked out of the park for a walkoff win and the whole season could have a different complexion. It didn't come down to the last game, last series, or last anything of the season. In a 162-game regular season, any one loss turned into a win would have given the Tigers the divison title. But there are some people who just can't see past the heartbreak of that final week. Why? Because math is hard.

The End of Summer

Summer is over again. It's back to work full-time tomorrow, and I never really stopped. Over the past two weeks I had off, I went to my classroom to work on seven out of the 10 weekdays, and really didn't take any time off. Vacation is for sissies anyway.

I'm going to go at this school year head-on. I've not been satisfied with my results lately, and it's time to try something different. I'm going to throw my textbook out the window. It's a useful tool to provide problems for the students to practice, but the textbook we have been using is written far higer than our students' literacy level. Its content also assumes knowledge that is most definitely not in evidence. So I am going to shake things up. As I understand it, we are to begin a cookie-cutter checklist this year that supposedly keeps all teachers of the same grade level on the same page at the same time. I'm not going to participate unless I am told to directly by my supervisors. I won't be insubordinate, but if I have my way my students won't start messing with variables and equations until I am absolutely confident that they can manipulate whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and percents with grade-level competence or better.

I'm tired of hearing the old argument that they'll get practice with computation as we move along. They surely don't. You can't practice what you don't know how to do. I am going to administer direct supervised learning of those basic skills for the first three or four weeks of school. How can I justify that? For the past five years we have been directed to spend the first month of school reviewing for our high-stakes standardized test. Well, this year the test is only given in the spring so I figure I have that month to take care of it. Computation is Indiana math standard 8.2 and I am going to beat the holy crap out of it until my kids' first move when confronted with a problem is no longer to reach for a calculator. It's not going to be all drill, athough I'm tired of hearing that drill doesn't work. It does. We've got some new technology in the classroom, including a buzzer system that lets kids ring in like they're playing Jeopardy. I'm going to use competition, games, and teacher-created activities to bring these kids up to speed.

They're going to calculate 15% and 20% tips mentally. They're going to make change from a cash drawer. They're going to figure out discounts and sales tax. They're going to develop a list of prime numbers up to 250 and be able to break down any composite number into its prime factors. When they're done with that, they're going to be able to tell whether a fraction is fully simplified by whether the top and bottom of the fraction are mutually prime. They're going to figure out, given a speed and remaining distance in a trip, how much longer they have to travel at that speed. And they're going to do it mentally! They're going to use the Pythagorean theorem to find hypotenuses to the nearest whole number in their heads. My kids will be able to read a frakking ruler, unlike my kids in years past.

I'm tired of trying to teach kids who can't reliably multiply 8 X 7 in their heads how to solve multi-step equations because someone who hasn't evaluated my students tells me it's the day that it has to be done. These kids are not stupid, but we are if we keep doing things the way we have been.

Square Root Day

It must be a slow news day, because I have seen from about five different sources that today is a rare "Square Root Day." The month and date are numbered the same and multiply out to the last two digits of the year. This happens nine times each century. I made a quick activity to do in class about the...well, phenomenon, I guess, even though it's really just a coincidence of the calendar. It's like when people thought the end of the world was coming from supernatural sources on January 1, 2000, when we humans were the ones who developed and (several times) corrected the calendar. I heard the same tripe when June 6, 2006 rolled around because it was 6/6/06. Unless the devil provided Pope Gregory XIII with a blueprint for destruction when the latter redesigned the calendar in 1582, it's just happenstance. It's just funny to watch people fall over themselves because of the occasional study in numerology that a calendar provides.

We do the same kind of math geeky thing with Pi Day on March 14. I don't really know why. Doesn't it kind of defeat the purpose of teaching kids that pi is an irrational number by celebrating on 3/14? Most of my 8th graders currently think that pi is 3.14, a terminating decimal anyway, and Pi Day just kind of reinforces that misconception. One of the things our school has done in the past is to make a long chain of decimal places of pi that are posted all the way around the building, surely wasting an entire day by each person contributing one number. By the time they're done the student has drawn a number on a piece of paper, and we have pi approximated to six hundred places. I'm not sure how useful that is to know and I'm not sure which Indiana math standard that applies to, but who am I to stand in the way of fun? Maybe it's a good thing that March 14 falls on a Saturday this year.

Oh, no! That means we'll celebrate on Friday the 13th!