NOT BASEBALL

I notice I have been off-theme and not writing “not baseball” on each of these.

Here is a quick summary of the rest of AMATYC:

I went to two OER sessions. Both showed no decrease in student success when they switched to OER, so students can save money and not have increased risk of failure. One group talked about how they had to overcome some faculty resistance (which really seemed to be inertia.) They offered a stipend to make the change. It seems to me this is just your regular curricular work, but more power to them if they can get a stipend to do what they are supposed to be doing anyway. They reminded me that I can use Geogebra and Desmos for demonstration software. I have gotten away from that a little bit lately.

I went to a session on apps in math for Liberal Arts, but found it a little slow and the presenter did not seem to know his audience, so I left it and went to a session on BASEBALL. The presenter had some interesting applicable calculations that could be done by students at almost any level. Unfortunately he also offered a total offense statistic that he said improved OPS because the denominators are different in OBP and SLG. What he missed is that when you add as rational expression SLG and OBP you get 1/PA*(Good Linear Weights Formula) + small error. This will correlate with total offense much better than the cleaner version he has because his linear weights do not correlate as well with actual offensive performance. His over-weights extra-base hits.

I went to one session on the new professional development document. In one sentence, it seems they have added mindfulness (Dweck’s work) and utility value to the standards. If I were to have a second sentence I would warn that it is a little stilted. They use the acronym IMPACT (Improving Mathematical Prowess and College Math Teaching) whenever the word impact is used in the text, for instance. PrOwESS is also an acronym (Proficiency, Ownership, Engagement, Student Success). The acronyms themselves seem pretty useful as I recalled these without looking back. I do hope they remove the stilted writing.

A session on training folks to teach QR courses was interesting, but really focused a lot on the Carnegie curriculum they were using.

New Examples of Linear Equations for class had a hand out that made it look like it could have been new in 1975 so I went to Projects in Liberal Arts Math. I have a couple ideas from hearing other attendees describe their projects.

I’ll write one more post with my goals for 2018 soon.