Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Sports math: From radical to mainstream?
(Shaun Alexander, fantasy football star and teaching tool?)
A few months ago, I highlighted a college education course that was written up in the journal “Radical Pedagogy” for its use of an NBA “fantasy team” of sorts to teach aspiring educators about the need for multiple measures of student performance.
Today, the all-sports cable network ESPN is touting the story of an eighth-grade teacher who lets kids pick fantasy football teams to help them learn math.
Can fantasy sports as a lesson plan go that quickly from “radical” to a potentially emerging mainstream trend? Perhaps.
Not familiar with fantasy sports? Here’s how it works. A group of people get together and draft “teams” of pro athletes in a given sport. Let’s use football as an example. My fantasy football team has 14 players and each week I have to choose seven to “play” — a quarterback, two running backs, two wide receivers, one tight end and one kicker. I get points every time my players score a touchdown or kick a field goal or extra point, plus bonus points for gaining lots of yards. My team’s total points are compared against my opponent for the week. The team with the most points wins.
Fantasy sports are a new phenomenon. Sports journalist Dan Orkent (more recently the first ombudsman of the New York Times) is credited with starting perhaps the first such league with friends who followed baseball in the 1980s. The idea is to allow the sports fan to feel what it might be like to own or run their own professional team — they pick the players through a draft, make trades, choose who starts, etc. And it’s fun. I’ve been playing fantasy football since 1991, and I’ve dabbled in fantasy baseball here and there.
Back when I first began playing, fantasy sports were math intensive. All those yards and points had to be tallied, added and compared to see which teams won each week. Now the Internet has made fantasy games incredibly automated. I followed every yard Shaun Alexander gained for Seattle Seahawks on Monday as my team’s scoring was instantly updated online before Alexander had even gotten up off the turf and returned to the huddle on every play.
There was a recent news story I read that profiled Sports Illustrated magazine’s new head of fantasy sports coverage. Much of the story was about how the magazine realized how mainstream fantasy sports had become in recent years, especially among younger fans, and what a big untapped market it was for them. Now the magazine includes a fantasy sports supplement for readers who are under 35 (notice that at 38, I am too old to be considered a serious fantasy sports player).
So are fantasy sports a smart avenue to use for teaching math to kids? I think it’s not a half bad idea.
There are now fantasy sports leagues for an incredible array of endeavors — fantasy golf, fantasy NASCAR, even fantasy bass fishing. Seriously. So it would be easy to let the kids’ own interests guide the process.
What you really get once you start playing is a huge data set of player outcomes — in football it would be yards gained, points scored, etc. If all students in a class were managing their own teams, there would be endless mathematical exercises they could undertake that might be interesting:
—What players in the league have scored the highest percentage of their teams points?
—How much would the worst player on each team need to increase weekly scoring output to equal the production of the best available free agent?
—What players were most over-valued and most under-valued in the draft?
—What is the probability a quarterback will equal his weekly scoring average based on his past performance against this week’s opponent?
I’ll be honest, I’ve done the math on some of those very questions in my league just for fun. When was the last time any eighth-grader you knew did math just for fun? For kids who are interested in sports, or even those who just like solving practical, real-life problems, it would seem fantasy sports could be a way to get them to see that math can be fun, interesting and useful.
But I know my bias here. I already enjoy fantasy sports. What’s your take on this math-teaching strategy?
(Image credit: Club card house)
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: My Favorite Posts, Teaching and Learning
Comments
By Oldprof
December 1, 2006 5:35 AM | Link to this
History lesson. The use of sports to teach math hails back to the 1920s, when some clever educators got their boys to do division and decimals by having them calculate batting averages. As for fantasy sports being relatively new, the old analog version of fantasy sports, most notably Strat-o-matic, has been around for decades. Now, the best function for fantasy sports may be to teach web-based research skills, since (a) the computer already does all the math (unless teachers come up with their own offline games) (b) most of the success in fantasy sports involves identifying which players are in decline and which are going to have their best seasons ever—which requires getting information from fantasy sports pundits and sportswriters who report from pre-season training.By Scott Elliott
November 30, 2006 3:43 PM | Link to this
Just a reminder that the main process for selecting a new board member is by election, a considerably less flawed process. The board only choses people to fill unexpired terms. Although your point is well taken. The current leadership of the board has benefitted by the opportunity to select three of the last four new board members. But in the end, all must get elected to continue in their roles.By Dave
November 30, 2006 10:06 AM | Link to this
I suspect this will work well with a majority of students, and a few will really dislike it. That’s why teaching is such a challenge. No two students learn the same way or have quite the same motivations. The teacher has to teach a bunch of individuals, not a number of homogeneous clones.By Mary
November 29, 2006 8:19 PM | Link to this
My take is it is another way to cram sports down students throats, as if schools are not doing that already. It would be interesting to see how many students would positively respond to this gimmick versus how many would roll their eyes.By lou
November 29, 2006 4:00 PM | Link to this
I say what ever it takes to get kids to understand math concepts. I have never used fantasy sports but I have used pool to teach angles, cooking to teach fractions, and use money to understand negative integers.