Resource Library

A poem written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to discuss systematic sampling.  Students should be familiar with the lyric being sampled from (though you could provide it to make sure) and verify that the systematic sample involved sampling every third word and starting with the lyric’s first word. Students could create their own poems with different systematic samples (or different text to sample from).  The poem is part of a collection of 8 poems published with commentary in the January 2020 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

A poem written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to discuss the normal distribution and its percentiles.  Students could first be shown a copy of the National Center for Health Statistics growth chart graph paper so they will appreciate the details of the poem. And after reading or hearing the poem, students could verify the detail that the 40th and 60th percentiles are half a standard deviation apart. The poem is part of a collection of 8 poems published with commentary in the January 2020 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

A poem written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to discuss the simplest case of line of fit where the slope and correlation coefficients each have a value of 0.  The poem is part of a collection of 8 poems published with commentary in the January 2020 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

A poem written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso.   The poem can be a vehicle to discuss the terms and language and is part of a collection of 8 poems published with commentary in the January 2020 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

A poem written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to discuss statistics examples involving social justice, inspired by his paper in March 2007 Journal of Statistics Education. The poem is part of a collection of 8 poems published with commentary in the January 2020 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

A poem written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to introduce the concept of Latin squares.  Be prepared to explain the meaning of the word “Latinx” in case some students don’t recognize it. The poem is part of a collection of 8 poems published with commentary in the January 2020 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

A haiku written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso for the ASA Day haiku contest celebrating the 180th anniversary of the American Statistical Association. This haiku might motivate students to learn about the history of ASA and/or of Florence Nightingale.  The haiku won first place in the non-student division and was published in the January 2020 Amstat News.

A haiku poem written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to spark discussion about multivariable thinking and confounding variables, which are a major emphasis of the 2016 GAISE College Report.  The poem is part of a collection of 8 poems published with commentary in the January 2020 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

A poem written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to discuss the topic of randomness and the lexical ambiguity of the word "random" in statistical versus everyday usage.  The poem is part of a collection of 8 poems published with commentary in the January 2020 issue of Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

A joke to start a discussion about how probability is used to study uncertainty in real life situations. The joke might depend somewhat on the composition of the audience since understanding the joke relies on knowing that probabilidad is the Spanish word for probability. Also, in delivering the joke it might help to put some emphasis on the last syllable to make this a true "dad joke". The joke was written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso.