Not really. You have to find a way to make the math real to your students or else it becomes just another exercise of "what set of words do I need to say in order to make the teacher happy". At least in my experience, most learning seems to be either incidental OR some sort of vestigial residue of the social component of making the system happy.
What? You can make easily make basic statistic and probability about real problems and interesting. Talk about sports. Talk about risks of the stock market and financial planning. Talk about politics/polling. Talk about gambling/poker. Just takes an interesting teacher to make any subject interesting.
Like, I want to believe you that such a thing is easy. But I'm not really convinced by the assertion that it is followed by a non-descriptive blurb. I mean I get what you're saying, "Find what they care about and try to apply statistics to it." However, I don't believe that this process is easy.
Sports is a good example of why I don't think this is easy. What exactly is the point of statistics in sports? Predicting what teams are going to win or what strategies are superior. Most children in school are not interested in sports because they're into strategy or because they're predicting who's going to win. They're interested in it for social reasons. Which team do their parents or friends want to win. Telling everyone at thanksgiving that the family team is going to lose the game will probably not go well for them. And as far as strategy goes ... I thought the statistical analysis of the extra point kick in football indicates that you should never do it. Teams rarely make use of this at the professional level. Also didn't they make a movie about how nobody pays attention to the math in baseball (Moneyball?). Anyway, if adults who have money and fame on the line can't be bothered to care about statistics in sports, then I don't see how children are going to be much different.
Of course that's where you come in. You say it's easy. Personally, I would love to see why you think this because it looks hard to me. I look forward to a more in depth response from you.
Well I'm commenting on the internet Verdex_3. I'm not going to take the time to write out a bunch of interesting statistical examples for you. I wasn't trying to say it's easy to make statistics interesting. Was only trying to refute what I thought that you were asserting; statistics and probability are not interesting to teach. Designing enjoyable, interesting, challenging and fair curriculum is a really hard task to do for any subject...
If you don't believe math can be made interesting I would checkout websites like FiveThirtyEight or youtube channels like numberphile. It's definitely possible to describe statistics or math problems in interesting ways. It's hard to make any class interesting, but any teacher can do it if they work at it hard enough.
Also your moneyball comment makes no sense. All teams operate like the 2002 Oakland A's now, if anything the the movie shows the triump of statistics over bad heuristics.
