I've just done a piece for Ubersportingpundit about the way that statistics loom so large in sport generally, and in cricket in particular. I gave it the same title there as I've used for this posting here. At the end I digressed into mentioning how sport encourages boys (especially) to get better at arithmetic.
That's it really. That's my point.
Take cricket. An enormous amount in cricket depends on, to put it bluntly, sums. Sums like: at what rate (runs per over) must the batting side score to get to their target total. If Steve Waugh makes a century, what will that do to his test match average? If England make 550, and Zimbabwe then make 250, and then followed on and make 200, England win by an innings and … what? (The Zimababwe cricket team, like much else in Zimbabwe these days, has been much weakened lately.)
I remember once explaining fractions to a twelve year old boy by talking about a soccer match the previous night. Man United had beaten some hapless rivals by 8 goals to 2. One Man U player scored 4 goals, so he scored half of the Man U goals. Another Man U guy scored 2 goals, so he scored a quarter of the Man U goals. And so on. The big insight was that this poor kid had never connected those damned "fractions" they tormented him with at school with regular and much used English words like "half" and "quarter". Yes, those are fractions. Four divided by eight, four over eight, is a half. Talking about football brought it all alive. I should imagine that there's many a maths teacher who has used sport in this kind of way.
Not enough do though.
Consider though, High School maths students could be kept busy for hours pondering the imponderable (also known as the Duckworth/Lewis system.)
I promised to explain the Duckworth/Lewis rule to readers of my blog some time, but I haven't quite got round to it, partly because when I read through the rule myself, I discovered that it wasn't quite as well designed as I had thought and that quite frankly I could do better. Of course, had I sent my ideas for such a rule to the ICC in 1993, the world of cricket might be cursing the Jennings rule instead of Duckworth/Lewis.
It's pretty common to find that people are being taught something in mathematics at school that they use all the time in real life, but do not realise it is the same thing. As a more complicated example, in physics you learn something called "spherical polar coordinates", which are quite difficult to understand. Point out that there is a special case of such a coordinate system that is in common use (latitude, longitude, and altitude) and it becomes easier to understand. I think the worst failure of maths and physics teachers is a failure to explain and demonstrate how the maths and physics is all around you, which it is.
As with cricket, baseball is a game of numbers. Baseball fans delight in arcane statistics and (back when I was a kid) good math teachers knew how to use a baseball fan's passion for numbers to encourage the learning of math. However, in recent years baseball has been falling behind flashy sports such as football and basketball. Football and basketball do have statistics, but nothing to compare with the intricacy and beauty of baseball statistics. Maybe we need to return baseball to its former status as the number one sport in the nation and our math scores will rise. (Could the popularity of soccer -- excuse me, "football" -- explain math difficulties in British schools?)
