Average book length

Some statistics are useful, and some are not. I don't know if this one is useful, but it's kind of fun:

The average book has 64,500 words.

I don't know exactly what I'd do with this in class, but it seems like an interesting opportunity to discuss why we use different statistical measures to describe data, and to get kids thinking about which measures feel useful in which situations. Is mean really the right measure of central tendency for this statistic? Is comparing a measure of central tendency even useful? Why do we care?

There also might be something (less exciting, more practice-y) about using all the stats for each book to work backwards to calculate the standard deviation. That also raises the question of whether mean and standard deviation are really the right descriptors. I am very curious whether word length is a normal distribution. It might depend on what genres of books you include (children's books seem like the have the potential to skew the data).

What other statistical questions might kids generate? How could they use info about the books they're reading in English class to do some further exploration?

Headlines from a Mathematically Illiterate World

http://mathwithbaddrawings.com/2013/12/02/headlines-from-a-mathematically-literate-world/

The longer I teach, the more I think that the math that feels most important for students to take away from my class is about learning to read, interpret, and critically evaluate the logical/illogical statements that float around every day. I do actively enjoy pure math kinds of things, but if it came down to a choice of residue, I'd give up a robust understanding of derivatives for my kids leave being able to read a graph in the newspaper and evaluate the reasonableness of the latest study's claim.

I think it would be really fun for kids to find ridiculous statements in news articles and correct them like this. It would be interesting to develop that critical eye for poorly worded statements, both from a language and a mathematical perspective.

The Fib

Fibonacci Poems

http://gottabook.blogspot.com/2006/04/fib.html

Is this actually mathematically cool? Or just a lame crossover attempt?

Stories vs. Statistics

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/stories-vs-statistics/

For one day when I get to do my interdisciplinary unit with an English class about how to persuade people using numbers. Brings up the good point of what do you want to sucker people in with? Will they be drawn in more by data or by a person's story?