High-School Teacher Builds Lessons After Students Learn Sport's Basics
By NANDO DI FINO
In their tiny classroom, walls dotted with math posters and warm-up exercises, students at Bay Cove Academy in the Boston suburbs spent the first week of school learning Football 101. "There were some kids who didn't even know what a quarterback was," says math teacher Ed Summers.
Soon, though, they tackled the basics and moved up -- to the Fantasy Leagues. Mr. Summers passed out rules for the game as if they were practice multiplication sheets. He gave the kids box scores and showed them where to look for stats their players had accrued, being sure to point out where tougher scoring stats like safeties and two-point conversions could be found. He even had some of the older kids understanding the intricacies of the scoring system, and how to assign value to, say, a quarterback versus a running back.
This is Mr. Summers's approach to teaching math, a decidedly un-cool topic with nerd connotations. Mr. Summers explains that the department tries to make projects "hands on," he says. "Otherwise they'll lose interest."
The high school, which sits behind Commonwealth and Harvard avenues in the Boston suburb of Brookline, serves kids ages 13 to 18 who have been referred by the public schools in the area. Known as a "therapeutic" high school, Bay Cove targets students whose "educational and social needs exceed those that traditional community schools can accommodate," its Web site says. It is one of the only schools in the nation that offers weekly counseling sessions for its students, many of whom have difficulties that prevent them from excelling at a public high school.
Prior to this school year, Mr. Summers was made the head math teacher after serving as the assistant for two years. He was now free to design his own curriculum and concoct a project for the kids that would keep them interested in math without seeming too gimmicky or corny.
Fantasy football seemed a natural fit. In August, he presented it to Principal Judy Gelfand. Initially a little skeptical, she has seen the results and now embraces the project.
"It's turned out great," she says. "Ed's enthusiastic and very smart. He's made it so they wouldn't know they were actually doing math."
The classes at Bay Cove are split up by age. Mr. Summers teaches three classes each day, with about ten kids in each, so he decided to create a separate league for each one. The draft was set for the Monday after the first week of the National Football League season. Mr. Summers had copied some pages from a fantasy-football magazine, with the previous year's statistics and point totals, and distributed them to the kids to serve as draft aides. He even introduced some of the more annoying decisions that fantasy-football owners outside of high school had to deal with, by marking players who were expected to split carries. And he cautioned that even the best players wouldn't always have stellar weeks for them.
"I just keep telling them that just like they are not on point everyday in class, the players have bad days too," he says.
Once "school-appropriate" team names were approved (they range from "Cookies" to "Team Peter Pan"), Mr. Summers brought out a large dry-erase board, picked the draft order out of a hat, and began the process of giving every one of his math students their own fantasy team. Two months from now, when the season draws to a close, the winning team will be treated to a lunch around the corner by Mr. Summers.
Mr. Summers assigned point values to touchdowns, rushing yards, receiving yards, and passing yards, and designated Monday as the day the class would compute their scores (he allotted time early on Tuesday for teams who had Monday-night games). While the idea of using fantasy to teach math has been tried before, Mr. Summers isn't just using the game as a teaching tool; he is using it as a testing tool, as well.
Teams in the Bay Cove leagues don't face each other in head-to-head matchups, but, rather, amass points as the season goes on. Mr. Summers views the Monday scoring as not just an exercise in long division for passing yards, but also a way to measure his students' success in learning the math. For every one of the scoring totals that turns out to be incorrect, the student is docked five points, resulting in a lower score.
"It actually balances out the playing field," he explains. "If your team is mediocre, but you're good at math, you may end up doing better than the great teams who don't do math really well."
Christel Maloney, the Senior Career Counselor at Bay Cove, heard the students buzzing about the league outside of the classroom and even constructed a bulletin board to hang outside the math room, with all the scores on display.
"The project has been great for the kids and the school," she says. "They're learning that math is a skill that they need in the real world, and it's added a little healthy competition to our community."
The competition has gotten so spirited, in fact, that Mr. Summers is currently lobbying the administration for one of his students' requests to have her weekly counseling times changed so she can be in class on Monday and do the fantasy scoring for her team.
And Mr. Summers points out that one student who is frequently known for cutting school has been popping up in his classroom with an alarming frequency.
"She's put in three scores," he proudly notes. "She's gotten roped into the project."
