Who’da thought this math-phobic would do back-to-back posts about statistics? But this one has nothing to do with the Amazon book sale stats. (Though if you really want to know, Different Dream is now #60 in the category where it’s been wrongly placed.)
This post is about a math project Jeff Wells, a high school math teacher in our school district, and I created during my teaching years. We called it Stat Buddies. Each fall, my fourth graders collected data on twenty-odd different things: how many light bulbs in their houses, how tall they were in inches, how many blocks they lived from school, to name a few. Once the data was all in, Jeff and the students in his Probability and Statistics class would come to our school. They used the data to teach fourth graders about median, mode, graphing, estimating, and so forth.
The project was a win-win situation for everybody. My students learned statistics from people who understood them instead of from their teacher who didn’t. Because the seniors had to teach kids about statistics, they had to know their subject matter thoroughly. But the benefits went far beyond math. Both age groups were engaged in learning. Relationships developed between students. Behaviors improved.
A few weeks ago Jeff emailed and invited me to come see what Stat Buddies has become. It’s part of the fourth grade curriculum now, he said. All fourth grades in the district participate in it, he said. You gotta come see it, he said.
So this morning, I visited three Stat Buddies classrooms and was tickled pink to see the project working better today than it did six years ago. But what tickled me most was seeing some former students teaching a new crop of fourth graders about statistics. One of them is in the picture – the guy in the purple hoody. Another ran up and gave me a big hug.
As a result, I’m on a statistical, humble high, the kind that comes when you see how your bumbling attempts to mask your weaknesses (in my case math skills) impact others in positive ways.
Thanks, Jeff, for the invitation. You made my day. And thank you, God, for working through my weakness.
