Data Point #934 Showing Why Teacher Education is Problematic

I was perusing the blog feed and I come across my favorite source for "interesting" teacher education issues. Okay, most of what he writes seems flawed, but at least he's advocating to "Burn The Textbooks, Shred The Worksheets, Teach Math", but I digress.

Click to enlarge that image.

It's measures of central tendency from a stack of pennies. How far down the list of values can you get before you reach an inconsistency in the numbers?

How is this a sample of what you, as a real math teacher, would want to show the world as exemplar of your students' work? Why would this page be the one that you put out to the world ... unless you were deliberately showing how you gave feedback, a la @mpersham's mathmistakes.org.

The project itself is a fine one ... I did the same thing when learning to use Fathom, and I plan on using it with my class this year.  But, really, if showing teachers "cool" or useful projects, wouldn't you want to display ones that are at least mostly (>50%) correct?

While this page would be great to show the relationship between sample statistics and population statistics, it's not at all clear to me whether our blogger noticed any of the problems.

Here is the population, if anyone is interested:

Reason #438 why kids have trouble.

During the passing time, Student is telling a story of how she had $20 in her backpack and then couldn't find it.

Thinks maybe her father took it when he drove her to her friend's house.

Another kid chimes in, "Yeah, my father always takes money out of my purse to go buy beer."

Kind of a shame when they trust their math teacher more than their parent.