{"id":374,"date":"2007-11-08T17:19:39","date_gmt":"2007-11-09T00:19:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/2007\/11\/mean-median-mode\/"},"modified":"2007-11-08T17:44:39","modified_gmt":"2007-11-09T00:44:39","slug":"mean-median-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/2007\/11\/mean-median-mode\/","title":{"rendered":"Mean, Median, Mode"},"content":{"rendered":"

I start out many days of the school year with a Daily, usually a quotation on the board the students have to puzzle over and write about for 5 minutes, but lately they have been questions. In order to add up points on these things (and not add a whole lot of reading on my part), students count up lines they’ve filled in order to figure out how many words they’ve written. We create average word counts and it goes like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Date<\/td>\nLine Number<\/td>\nWord Count<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
10\/2<\/td>\n5<\/td>\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
10\/5<\/td>\n4<\/td>\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
10\/8<\/td>\n7<\/td>\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
10\/18<\/td>\n1<\/td>\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
10\/22<\/td>\n3<\/td>\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
10\/23<\/td>\n6<\/td>\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
10\/26<\/td>\n4<\/td>\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
11\/1<\/td>\n9<\/td>\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

We crunch the numbers in order to arrive at a good average of how many words they write on each line. The current goal is 120 words, so each student knows how many lines s\/he needs to write to reach that goal. While putting this together the other day, during all periods of English, we ran through mean, median, and mode<\/a>. “So, we’re getting the mean for all this?” I asked. “Yeah.” “Then what would be the mode?” “4, ’cause you’ve listed that number twice.” “What if I didn’t repeat a number?” “Then there’d be no mode.” Oh…<\/p>\n

Help<\/h4>\n

I know there’s a practical application for mode and median, just as much as there’s a practical application for scanning poetry. Actually, that might be a bad comparison. Still, someone please tell me, because I want to be able to briefly mention it to my students next time, why would I ever need to identify the mode or the median of a set of numbers? The more you place your reason into the world around us, the more likely it’ll sink in and make it out my mouth to my kids.<\/p>\n

I’m particularly proud of having even quickly given students a review of mean, median, and mode, but it just made me realize all the times that I’m not doing anything to let kids know that all subject areas are linked.<\/p>\n

Do you read papers for grammar, even if you’re not an English teacher? In your P.E. class, would you let a student say “The civil war happened in 1960, when Martin Luther had a dream” without correcting him? Would you non-science teachers let a student slip in “Since the periodic table tells us that the abbreviation for gold is Gd…”? Would you just walk past a student saying “I don’t exercise ’cause it doesn’t matter”? I hope you’re talking to that kid who proudly declares “reading is stupid,” even if you don’t teach reading. Everything is connected<\/a> and if the ship is sinking<\/a>, we’re all going to drown<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I start out many days of the school year with a Daily, usually a quotation on the board the students have to puzzle over and write about for 5 minutes, but lately they have been questions. In order to add up points on these things (and not add a whole lot of reading on my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[98],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.toddseal.com\/rodin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}