Teaching Your Kid the Real Relevance of Math (and All Hail Manny)

I hated math growing up. It was, hands down my least favorite subject. Why, because despite attending well regarded schools, no-one ever made math fun by making it relevant to what interested me - like sports.

It was always memorization of tables…and complex operations such as algebra, stats and trig were self-serving exercises. The closest I ever came to actually enjoying math was in geometry but that was probably more a function of the fact that you could draw and play games on a TI-81 graphing calculator. That and this girl I had a huge crush on sat next to me.

I wish that someone had made math interesting because I sure as as shit needed math once I got out into the workforce and I wish I’d retained more growing up.

It seems to me (and I wish it had dawned on my folks 20 years ago) that an easy way to make math interesting is by connecting it to sports.

The proliferation of the web and fantasy sports leagues means that sports statistical data once available only to analysts at ESPN and bookmakers is widely available and easily accessible. Just go to ESPN.com, FOXSports.com or any other site and it’s right there.

My son’s not old enough to learn about math or fantasy sports (multi-word sentences need to come first) but when he is, I’ll use sports stats as one of my tricks for teaching an appreciation of (or at least the relevance of) math. For those of you who want to jump start Junior (or Janey) using the sports-stats connection, there may be nothing better than this interactive feature pictured above.

Oh, and go Sox and all hail Manny. I’ll be nice to see a ballplayer reach a milestone without ‘roids coursing through his veins!