This poem (slightly revised from its publication in the January 2013 Journal of Humanistic Mathematics) was written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. It is a vehicle to discuss equiprobability bias – the misconception that all outcomes must always be equally likely.
A haiku poem that makes a parallel of parsimony between poetry and a statistical model (imagine changing its middle line to “predictors to a model”).
The poem was written by Lawrence Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in February 2021 and published in the April 2021 Amstat News.
A piece of mathematical wordplay-based art displayed in the 2024 Bridges Exhibition of Mathematical Art, Craft, and Design (see https://gallery.bridgesmathart.org/exhibitions/bridges-2024-exhibition-o...). The lowest level of understanding the arithmetic mean (Pre-K-12 GAISE II, p. 18) is a “fair share value” -- each person’s portion if a resource were shared equally. This is also a “levelling value” corresponding to the height x of the A’s extended crossbar, and x is the mean of the 4 letters’ heights if they were .5x, .5x, 2x, x. A higher level of understanding the mean is as a “balance point,” where A’s apex is the fulcrum placed where unit weights at M and E balance two weights stacked at N: the mean of the 4 weights’ x-coordinates is the x-coordinate of the fulcrum.
This poem, written in July 2024 by Lawrence M. Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso, is in the form of a bimodal distribution, reflected in the poem’s real-world context. Before showing the poem, a teacher could first ask students to reflect on what they would expect a histogram of ages of pedestrians killed (or severely injured) to have and why (chances are some of their suggested rationale will be captured in the poem!).
Afterwards, students wanting to examine or discuss real-world evidence of such a distribution may look for data on their own, or be shown section 1.1.3 of
Roe, M., Shin, H., Ukkusuri, S., Blatt, A., Majka, K. et al. (2010), “The New York City Pedestrian Safety Study and Action Plan Technical Supplement,” New York City Department of Transportation. http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/nyc_ped_safety_study_action_plan_technical_supplement.pdf .
This visual poem may also inspire students to write their own short statistics poem using (and connecting to) a data set with a differently shaped distribution.
These clerihew poems (chronologically by statistician) written by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso were written in 2023 and appeared in the April 2024 Amstat News or the July 2024 Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.. Each clerihew poem takes a famous statistician and (like all clerihew poetry) starts with their name and finishes the two couplets with playful or quirky details about their career or life. Such poems could be used to humanize the class and because of the short simple form involved students could be invited to create their own about other statisticians.
This haiku collection by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso was written in 2020 and won second place in the 2021 A-mu-sing Competition. Each haiku in the collection addresses some property or real-world application of expected value that can be explored in class: the math and psychology in the structuring of an internationally syndicated game show (Deal or No Deal), tree diagrams (that students can do a calculation to verify in a realistic popular context of college basketball, showing how the EV need not correspond to the most likely outcome), an engaging probability paradox (in the context of the most popular animal Americans own as pets), the interaction with utility when making consumer decisions, a concrete visual analogy for a distribution’s expected value (inspired by Figure 2 of Martin’s July 2003 JSE article), and the concept of an estimator’s bias, and the how EV and mean express the same idea but in different contexts (random variable versus a sample, population or probability distribution).
A poem written in 2023 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso that can offer a vehicle for students to reflect on parallels (in language or process) between poetry and statistics. The poem was first published with commentary in the Autumn 2023 issue of Consilience.
A video from the 2019 US Conference On Teaching Statistics where Dennis Pearl from Penn State University is introducing the winner of that year's CAUSE/USCOTSLifetime Achievement Award in Statistics Education. He tells a story that can be useful in teaching the lesson that linear regression is inappropriate for making predictions well outside the range of the data. The story is loosely based on the phone call he made in ordering the trophy for the award.
A joke to initiate a conversation about the importance of understanding your Sampling Frame when conducting surveys. The joke was written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in 2021.
A cartoon that can be used in discussing how choosing an appropriate sample size must balance budget and logistics along with statistical power. The cartoon was used in the April 2023 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was written by retired AP Statistics teacher Jodene Kissler. The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University. An alternate caption for the cartoon might be “The Negative Correlation Moving Company had trouble holding on to their shorter employees,” that can be used to discuss the difference between positive and negative associations.