I've spent most of my blogging time today writing a ridiculously long piece about the complexities of qualifying out of the group matches at the European Soccer Championships, and a link from here to there is all I can offer today.
Here, gratuitously, is the picture I used to illustrate the kind of stuff I was writing about.
The educational relevance? Well, simply that sporting arithmetic is a great way to teach arithmetic to small boys. I still remember with pleasure the day I explained about fractions to a small boy, by talking about a soccer game.
And I dare say there's even the occasional girl who might be persuaded to take maths a bit more seriously with talk about sport.
Kids should play snooker for addition and darts for subtraction.
There's a great computer game called "Roller coaster tycoon" that teaches accounts. You don't do the arithmetic yourself, but you see columns of constantly-changing figures, and have to make judgements about how much to spend on new rides, whether to raise or lower entrance fees, whether to borrow with interest etc, in order to build your business rather than going under.
A new kind of capitalist maths for the computer generation.
(You can also drown awkward customers- which I think satisfies an urge that anti-capitalists might not be very good at comprehending).
I have long thought that a facility with the 2x and 3x tables up to 20, and complete ease with subtraction of numbers up to about 401, were a certain sign of a mis-spent youth.
Alas the chosen sport of my children (ice-hockey) lends itself more to fighting than to maths - any score over 10 is greeted by our coach with cries of "That isn't a score, it's a telephone number!"
I had a friend in grad school who said that the junior-high aged girls she taught (in Catholic school) claimed they "couldn't do percentages" until she asked them "Okay, then. You're at the mall. You see a red silk blouse with an original price of $60. It's now 40% off. How much does it cost."
Some of them could even figure up the price with the sales tax included.
Thanks for all these comments. Alice, how are you doing in Texas? Well I trust. I keep meaning to link to you from somewhere, but have yet to get around to it. I promise to correct this soon.
Mark, that's my quote of the day, whichever day it was.
All this reminds me of my elder brother Peter, who used to play amazingly complicated games of dice cricket, twiddling the dice away continuously, and keeping the entire score in his head. I wish I could say that he went on to become a computers millionaire. Well, I could say it, but it wouldn't be true. He's a book dealer.
I can't help adding that Italy DID beat Bulgaria, but Denmark and Sweden DID draw 2-2, and so Italy became the first team ever to score five points and still go out at the group stage. Now I'm off to swank about this at Ubersportingpundit.
Swank noted and appreciated.
I will merely add that I learned more arithmetic pondering cricket statistics then I ever did in a classroom.
