I’ve been thinking about what this unit plan needs to look like. It’s important that the cumulation of the unit is the application of what I can glean from working with Richard at SAMSI. Statistics is a difficult subject even for adults with fully developed, sophisticated, abstract thinking…for students with less developed abstract understanding, this will be a challenge.

I’ve been writing the overall unit plan. I was really concerned about how to do this, but the template seems to be making short work of this. (Although I may, as in all things, being a little too verbose.) It’s always good to force myself to think about how  and why I plan things the way I do. As I teach the same materials over years, I keep changing (and I hope improving) what I do with a particular curriculum, and this process is giving me a new way to do this.

I am not a math teacher. I’ve barely been trained as one, and yet it’s an integral part of teaching science well. For me, math is (at least partially) intuitive. I know it is not this way to many people. And this is the piece that is missing for many students. They may love science but not be able to apply mathematical concepts to their ideas. That marriage is what scientists need to be able to do! This project is forcing me to think about how to explain a mathematical concept clearly, simply, and frankly to students who probably have little to no formal understanding of statistics. Most kids understand more of stats than they think, just from reading news. I hope to access some of this.