The Statistical Revolution

There are many things I love, but two things that stick out are sports and mathematics. Call me a dork (you wouldn’t be the first one) but one is my career, and the other has always been a passion of mine. When I was a kid, the math in sports was minimal, and I was calculating batting averages as early as 2nd or 3rd grade. That was about as far as it got. In baseball, all that anyone cared about were the big three, batting average, home runs, and RBI’s. In football, we had yardage, TD’s, sacks, and interceptions. In basketball, it was points, assists, and rebounds.


But behind the scenes, things were changing. This finally started getting revealed with Michael Lewis’ 2003 book, Moneyball, about the Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane who had started using statistical analysis more than scouts to evaluate players and draft minor leaguers. Since then statistical analysis has exploded in baseball, and the “new school” way of thinking is called sabermetrics. A few of the earlier stats have made their way into the mainstream baseball lexicon such as OPS and BABIP and there are dozens of others that look far more in depth than the basic statistics can even dream of. It is also starting to take off in other sports, such as basketball. Although it seems as if a lot of the advanced stats there are kept more close to the vest and not shared with the general public. Football has also been awaken, as we now have stats to measure all players, not just the efficiency of the “skill” positions. The guys at football outsiders have been using statistical analysis to predict games for the past few years and do remarkably better than the mainstream analysts.

So it would seem, that the best way to break into the sports world these days is not to work on your jump shot, hit the weight room, or practice your knuckleball, but to find new and exciting ways of using mathematics. The sports world has finally wisened up and realized that the eyes do often deceive us, and that objective evidence is a lot more valuable then subjective analysis and the opinions of people that are always rife with bias. So keep punching on those calculators and you too could be the next big thing in sports!

Change-up

So only about 5% of my students have twitter, so I just created a facebook "celebrity" type page and if my students "like it", then they will get my updates on facebook.  I think this might work better.  I will update in a bit when I get some feedback.

Social Media and the Modern Classroom

So September is here and the kids are bustling through the hallways once again.  I'm still in my early 30's, but the classroom of 2010 looks nothing like the classroom of my youth.  Yes there are still rows of desks, bulletin boards, and textbooks.  But now a smartboard is attached to the wall, a graphing calculator is attached to the projector, and my entire textbook is available online with some amazing interactive features.  But is this enough?  Are we really keeping up with the times in education?  The answer, unfortunately is often, no.  Many are set in their ways and embracing new things is difficult at any age. 

As any good teacher does, I am constantly evaluating myself.  At the end of each lesson, I keep a notebook of what can be done to improve or change each lesson for the following year.  At the end of each year, I look for ways to add to my "toolbox" of pedagogical strategies to better serve my students.  After a lot of great reading and some interesting talks with colleagues, I have decided to try to incorporate social media into my curriculum. 

It is an ADD society we live in and its students are constantly being pulled in a million different directions.  Between school, parents, sports, clubs, work, television, and the internet students are often multitasking and Mr. Waldstein's math homework is unfortunately going to be way down on the list of priorities.  However, if we as teachers can enter that digital network with them, the material being taught can actually relate and fit in with their daily lives.  Crazy Thought!

However, this idea is not without some major problems.  Most schools (including my own) have filters that block facebook/twitter/myspace/etc making it difficult to make it a prominent part of any lesson.   Facebook seems to be the site prominently used by my students so I was thinking of making a profile for homework assignments, educational links, and classroom calenders.  However, facebook is a little too personal and I dont want to exchange pictures and hear about their personal thoughts.  So I havedecided to get my feet wet in this endeavor with a twitter account.  It is quick, to the point, and more impersonal.  I dont see any need to ever use more than 140 characters to get my point across. 

So I just created a twitter account for my teacher alter-ego, and am going to encourage my students to "follow" me.  I will send tweet homework assignments, test-reminders, links to educational and ~educational stories that I think they will find interesting.  This will be my starting point and I hope to expand this use in the upcoming weeks, months, and years. 


Some awesome ideas that I have read about from other teachers of all subjects
*Create a facebook page about your favorite literary character. 
*Field trips using Skype (You dont even have to leave the room!)
* Create a new iphone/droid/insert phone here ap related to the educational topic
* tweet famous speeches or conversations (it's the modern way to paraphrase)

It can also be used for extra collaboration between students, teachers, and parents; speaking to other educators and sharing ideas, create groups, and hundreds of other possible uses.  I look forward to delving into this new pool of possibilities and excited for the positive impact I think it can have on my students.