Ever improving

I'm only three weeks into this year's AP Statistics course and I am already thinking about how to make next year's course even better.

I'm not sure there exists a high school course better suited to bringing math alive than statistics. It is absurdly easy to connect the math of statistics with the everyday world. One could build an entire course based solely on FiveThirtyEight.com. Or one could teach the book Freakonomics. I have always wanted to teach a Baseball Statistics course. It would be amazing to teach statistics through the lens of baseball. There is endless material. The Ken Burns series. Moneyball. Bill James. Fantasy Baseball. Strat-O-Matic baseball.

That last idea has already got me thinking about how I might teach probability this year. If you've never heard of Strat-O-Matic and you teach statistics, then you seriously need to check it out now. Essentially, two players roll dice to determine the outcomes of a baseball game. Strikeout? Fly ball? Homerun?

Strat-O-Matic is not just baseball. In fact, you could probably create your own Strat-O-Matic game for Congress and then go about simulating votes all sorts of famous bills in history. You could see what would happen if Michael Huffington had become California's US Senator in place of Dianne Feinstein. I think I have just decided how to teach simulations in my AP Statistics course. High five to blogging.

This summer I got to go to a professional development conference at Stanford, the Stanford Summer Teaching Institute (SSTI). I attended the math workshop which was devoted to teaching mathematics using engaging and rich tasks. Chances are, if you are reading this blog, you know who Dan Meyer is. You probably also know who Robert Kaplinsky is. The leaders of our workshop, Zack Miller (@zmill415) and Anna Blinstein (@Borschtwithanna), led us through numerous activities such as how much a 100x100 cheeseburger from In-N-Out would cost and how to inspire by presenting them with interesting videos or photos that have the potential to stimulate rich math discussions and inquiry.

What is blatantly obvious to me is that an AP Statistics course could be taught exclusively with such tasks and activities. There are already courses out there that use Problem-Based Learning, Project-Based Learning, and/or Activity-Based Learning. So this is certainly not a new idea in the mathteacherblogosphere (#MTBoS). I just feel like I am missing out on a wonderful opportunity to implement these ideas in full force in my AP Statistics course.

Hopefully, somebody reads this who knows of a teacher who is already teaching AP Statistics much like the courses outlined on Emergent Math. I have no desire to recreate the wheel here. I certainly expect to create some of my own materials as I have been doing for many years now. But I know that there are teachers out there doing amazing things in their classrooms and online and I love to borrow the work of others to help my students have the best experience possible. So, please, if you have ideas that can help me, by all means share. Post a comment so others can benefit, too.