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  • A song for teaching about the multiplication rule.  Using the popular topic among young adults of relationships, the multiplication principle is memorably illustrated by having Paul Simon's #1 hit song (which states only a half-dozen ways to leave your lover, not 50) revisited to show 50 literal paths for ending a relationship: (5 reasons for the decision) X (5 methods to relay the decision) X  (2 options for handling acquired stuff). The lyrics were written by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso to the tune of Simon’s same-titled 1975 song.  The audio recording features vocals by Abeni Merryweather and production by Abeni Merryweather  from UTEP's commercial music program.  The song tied for second place in the 2023 A-mu-sing contest.  

    The structure of the problem in the song is similar to Exercise 3 in the progressive curriculum sequence outlined in the Spring 2024 Journal of Mathematics Education at Teachers College article “A Problem-based Curriculum to Develop the Multiplication Principle for Counting”: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/jmetc/article/view/11949/6300

     

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  • A poem for encouraging discussion on aspects of making predictions using regression models (e.g. treating possible non-linearity).  The poem was written in 2023 by Dane C Joseph from George Fox University in Oregon.

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  • A cartoon to show the misleading nature of graphs with a y-axis scale that does not start at zero (here real data is plotted to make it appear that the population of Dublin, Ireland doubled in a single year between 2021 and 2022).   The cartoon was based on an idea by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso in May, 2023.

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  • A humorous cartoon by American cartoonist Jon Carter in 2018 which may be used for in-class discussions about interpreting time series plots. The drawing indicates confusion about what each axes represents, since the plot itself indicates the  x-axes labels time, but the axes itself says "customer intelligence"  and there is no scale on either axesThe cartoon is free to use in non-profit educational settings.

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  • A cartoon that can be helpful as a vehicle to discuss how finding a good data visualization to tell the story of a study’s results is an art – even if it must be combined with the science of statistics to give an appropriate impression.  The cartoon was used in the July 2022 CAUSE cartoon caption contest and the winning caption was submitted by John Montagu, a student at University of Colorado, Boulder.. An alternative caption:  "While each plot was from a different perspective, it was the aggregation of the plots that told the whole story." was submitted by Jim Alloway from EMSQ Associates, and reinforces the idea that it may take several graphs to give a full picture of a data set.The cartoon was drawn by British cartoonist John Landers (www.landers.co.uk) based on an idea by Dennis Pearl from Penn State University.

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  • "WON OVeR" is a poem by Lawrence Mark Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso. The poem was written in 2022 and originally published in the January 2023 Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.  The poem highlights the unexpected occurrence of the constant 1/e in two classic probability problems:  “secretary problem”/”marriage problem” and “hats derangement problem”.  The poem could be used either to motivate students to learn about those particular problems or to cap things off after working through them.  

     

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  • A joke to teach the idea that the average of independent measurements are more reliable than individual measurements from the same process.  The joke should help start a discussion of the importance of the independence assumption in this idea.  The joke was written by Dennis Pearl, Penn State University and Larry Lesser, The University of Texas at El Paso in September, 2022.

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  • An interesting sestina poem to discuss measurement scales and can also be used while discussing spurious correlations if the teacher provides a guiding question such as “What part of the poem describes the relationship between quantitative variables, rather than just descriptions of quantitative variables? Are those relationships examples of 'Spurious Correlations' (per the title of the poem)? Explain briefly."   If the students need further help, the instructor might suggest that they focus on the second to last stanza.  The was written by Jules Nyquist, the founder of Jules' Poetry Playhouse, a place for poetry and play and published in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (2022) v. 12 #2 p.554.

     

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  • A climate change related poem describing the numerous record temperature values being set (expressing that as unusual under a model of no overall warming but the norm in reality).  The poem was written by author with pen name Anubis the Philosomancer in July 2013 and posted on the poetry website hello poetry.com

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  • A joke relating the voting preferences of certain states with the shape of a map of the states (i.e. the shape they take if viewed as a histogram).  The joke was written in 2019 by Larry Lesser from The University of Texas at El Paso.

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