A short song describing the benefits of blocking in experimental design by Heather Nichols, a teacher at Oak Creek High School in Wisconsin. It teaches students that blocking reduces variability in the response variable by creating groups of similar experimental units to see how they respond differently to the treatments in the experiment. The song was part of a pair of songs (along with the Randomization Song) that took the grand prize for the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest.
A 3rd-place winner in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest, “Backyard” was written, performed, and recorded in 2025 by Lawrence Mark Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso. The song takes the famous quote of John Wilder Tukey (“The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone’s backyard.”) and illustrates it with a variety of statistical applications in actual backyard settings! This can help recap or preview multiple topics of a course as well as celebrate and promote the interdisciplinary nature of our field, as well as discuss how modern tools in data science have precursors in the Exploratory Data Analysis techniques developed by John Tukey.
A 3rd-place winner in the 2025 A-mu-sing Contest, “College GAISE” was written, performed, and recorded in 2025 by Lawrence Mark Lesser of The University of Texas at El Paso. The song describes key components of the College Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education and provides extra value for those studying the GAISE report by providing the numbered guideline referred to in each line of the song - with the numbers taken from Perrett, J. (2024). Revising the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction of Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report. Scatterplot, 1(1).
A cartoon to use in explaining how hypothesis testing typically includes a null hypothesis that nothing is going on except random chance and p-values are calculated under that assumption. The cartoon was created by Joy Reeves from the Rachel Carson Council of Duke University and took first place in the cartoon/joke category of the 2025 A-mu-sing competition.
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 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.
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.
A song for teaching about the multiplication rule. Using the popular topic among young adults of relationships, the multiplication principle is memorably illustrated by having Paul Simon's #1 hit song (which states only a half-dozen ways to leave your lover, not 50) revisited to show 50 literal paths for ending a relationship: (5 reasons for the decision) X (5 methods to relay the decision) X (2 options for handling acquired stuff). The lyrics were written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to the tune of Simon’s same-titled 1975 song. The audio recording features vocals by Abeni Merryweather and production by Abeni Merryweather from UTEP's commercial music program. The song tied for second place in the 2023 A-mu-sing contest.
The structure of the problem in the song is similar to Exercise 3 in the progressive curriculum sequence outlined in the Spring 2024 Journal of Mathematics Education at Teachers College article “A Problem-based Curriculum to Develop the Multiplication Principle for Counting”: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/jmetc/article/view/11949/6300