I finally got the concept of borrowing when Chris, the math geek who sat behind me, let me borrow the answer. He got me out of that bind and I've been running from math ever since. There is a reason other than getting into sporting events for free that I made words my career.
I never cared to understand logarithms or how long it would take two trains traveling at different speeds to crash into one another. I haven't balanced my checking account since I opened it. I live by the words of "rough estimate." I pick a number and hope I'm somewhere close to what I need to be.
Apparently, there are others out there like myself. Finally there is a teacher who is taking pity on us math-challenged folks.
Dan Flockhart, a teacher from California, was in Salt Lake City this week presenting at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics annual meeting.
His goal is to show math can be fun and, yes, understandable to students who can't grasp the concept or just view math as that long hour of class before they get to go to chemistry and blow up something.
His avenue is through fantasy sports. Frustrated that Americans were getting worse and worse at math, he integrated his hobby in his classroom and found students suddenly started paying attention when touchdowns, field goals and other elements had numerical value.
"It was amazing because everyone got involved," he said. "It's by far and away the best curriculum I've used. Nationally, what we were doing wasn't working. I thought there had to be a better way."
Seems he has found it. Now he has authored eight books on the subject, has a Web site (www.fantasysportsmath.com) and said he has about 100,000 students in the program.
The students pick their teams, manage their teams and follow their progress with graphs, stats and all kinds of math with which they relate.
Of course, it's a little early to determine how many proficient sports bettors this philosophy of his is going to turn out along with math whizzes, but at least he is invigorating students with math.
"Math is hard," he said. "But even algebra makes more sense when H = home run."
That makes sense. I wonder if he could ever explain to me why X = Y.
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* LYA
WODRASKA can be reached at lwodraska
@sltrib.com. To write a letter about this or any sports topic, send an e-mail to sportseditor
@sltrib.com.
Lya Wodraska
