Hagen started teaching math at Foothill High School in January. Faced with the challenge of motivating a group of students who face real-life challenges after the final bell, he sought something beyond traditional math textbooks to help him break through. To the surprise of his students, and many of his colleagues, Hagen's solution to real-world problems turned out to be fantasy football.
The idea is strikingly simple. Just as in normal fantasy football leagues, Hagen's math students draft a team at the beginning of the fall semester, make trades with classmates, pick different starting lineups each week and compete against one another for total points. But in order for the students to add up their fantasy points each week, they have to first plug their football statistics into mathematical formulas. They can't figure out their total points, or their classmates' points, until they first do the math.
I had a high school chemistry teacher who would either blow something up or set something on fire if he thought our attention was wavering. And a physics teacher who would throw things at us if we weren't paying attention.
I had a physics teacher who lets build rockets, work the machine shops and blow up stuff in general. My teachers knew about fantasy sports and i pitched the idea to him but it didn't go over well with the rest of the class.
My little bro was having trouble with math in elementary school (grade 2? 3? something like that) and my Mom asked me to help him out. I taught him multiplication using D&D...
"Okay, so if you hit the orc with the two-handed sword it does 2d6 points of damage plus your strength bonus - what range is the damage you can inflict?"
Teachers are so binded by what the cirriculum (sp?) has set for them, that it's encouraging to see a teacher take something considered boring and attempt to make it fun.
Cafe Home
Fantasy Baseball
Fantasy Basketball
Fantasy Hockey
by Leber » Wed Dec 06, 2006 3:46 pm 
