A Triple Play: Mathematics, Baseball, And Storytelling

There are many effective teaching pedagogies. One way we have found to produce results is to combine the use of storytelling about baseball in mathematics classes. This paper will illustrate a positive relationship between the three different subjects of baseball, storytelling and mathematics and explain why teachers may want to explore this triple play combination as part of their pedagogy. First, there is more to teaching mathematics than solutions to math problems. Mathematics instruction involves thinking skills such as grouping, ordering, pairing, memory, and number related problems, all cognitive capabilities that create the framework for a student’s understanding of math. Mathematics also involves ideas such as rotation, magnitude, curves, space, change, spirals, probabilities, equations, roots and other concepts. Second, many of these same math concepts are also found in the game of baseball which not only lends itself to math problems, but can be developed into stories that become metaphors to assist in the cognitive understanding of mathematical concepts and thinking skills. Finally, a growing body of research also supports the pedagogy of storytelling in a host of settings including the academic environment. Businesses, hospitals, governmental bodies and schools are discovering the power of stories to shape listeners’ understanding and awareness. This study examines research on mathematical learning and storytelling and uses the action research of baseball umpiring to illustrate how baseball and storytelling can be used effectively in a math classroom. Both have singular benefits. Combined they have even stronger benefits as assessed by student retention numbers, student evaluation, and student feedback. When baseball stories are used, students’ cognitive capabilities for the understanding of mathematics will increase. Mathematics, Baseball, and Storytelling the home team math’matically eliminated... autumn equinox 1 Baseball is a game that can “make fans catch their breath and pause while the pitcher looks for a sign, the moment a rookie gets picked off first, or the instant the batter lashes a homer into the night sky, just before the crowd explodes onto its feet.” 2 Baseball, much like the popular Japanese form of poetry, Haiku, utilizes metaphors and mathematical form to tell its story. Given recent math trends and headlines stating Sluggish Results Seen in Math Scores (New York Times, October 14, 2009), and Math-Abused Students: Are We Prepared to Teach Them? (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, May 1999) we suggest mathematics teachers look P ge 15107.2 to the sport of baseball and the pedagogy of storytelling for ideas to “decrease emphasis on routine procedural skills and increase emphasis on real-world uses of mathematics and multi-step problem solving.” 3 Increasing evidence is starting to emerge that supports this claim. George Lakoff and Rafael Nunez, in their enlightening 2000 book titled Where Mathematics Comes From describe how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being. “Most of the brain is devoted to vision, motion, spatial understanding, interpersonal interaction, coordination, emotions, language, and everyday reasoning.” 4 Thus, stories such as baseball stories for mathematics applications can organically assist the brain in learning and students in understanding. Many situations that take place on a baseball field can easily be carried over and analyzed in an academic environment in search of fun, interesting academic goals. 5 Given the natural combination of baseball and mathematics, storytelling is a pedagogy that teachers should consider in order to increase student learning. In an opening address to the Mediterranean Conference on Mathematics Education, international writer Apostolos Doxiadis stated: “I was a hater of mathematics once. In fact I was a fanatical hater, until age fourteen. It was my teachers who were the culprits. And also, it was a teacher who suddenly, miraculously, made me a passionate lover. His way—though I’m not sure he did it consciously-was the stories he told me of mathematics.” 6 PRISM magazine has included at least two articles related to storytelling and teaching. David Chesney, University of Michigan, tells how stories enliven his lectures in electrical engineering and computer science in the January 2009 edition Story TimeA well told yarn holds students’ attention and helps them remember what is taught “They always ask for more.” 7 A second PRISM article in February 2007 titled A Man with Big IDEOS, profiles Stanford’s David Kelly who uses stories to help his engineering students with “design thinking” which helps them come up innovative ideas. 8 And many university faculty are interested in using storytelling in the classroom, but don’t know how, according to Chesney. Following a paper Big Fish II: The lost Science of Story-telling in the Engineering Classroom, Chesney said he had “several faculty ask him for advice on how to acquire the necessary skills to become a good story-teller.” 9 Chesney also has many requests “from students in end-of semester evaluations to include more stories in subsequent offerings of the course.” 10 Cindy Walters, North Carolina A & T State University, in a 2007 paper titled Engineering is Life: Storytelling in the Material Science Classroom presented to the American Society for Engineering Education offers “several examples of the use of storytelling in an introductory Materials Science class. Qualitative responses indicate that students enjoy this mode of presentation.” 11 This paper examines our journey and how mathematical learning and baseball storytelling can be used to enhance learning in the classroom. Both have singular benefits, however when combined they may have even greater advantages. And the combination is increasingly relevant. Google has multiple sites that reference the two combined terms. In short, when baseball stories are used, students’ cognitive capability for the understanding of mathematics increases. P ge 15107.3 One Mathematician’s Journey to Baseball Stories as Pedagogy for Teaching Louisville Slugger the boy’s fingertips caress the trademark 12 When I first started teaching, I also started umpiring baseball. As a teacher, I did not focus on stories very much and mostly approached the teaching of mathematics more directly. Content mattered most. Today content still matters, however, over the years the culture of umpiring led me into the world of storytelling because I learned when I shared a personal experience in a class, it would spark student interest. Later as I was invited to speak on baseball, umpiring, and mathematics, I learned to gather stories. In 2006 I experienced an “aha” moment during a University Tilford Diversity Storytelling training event held on the K-State at Salina campus. During this occasion, I realized my teaching pedagogy already included storytelling, the concept that international storyteller Tim Tingle was training and encouraging us to incorporate into the classroom. As a result, I enrolled in a local storytelling class. I also became a practitioner and started classifying my stories and gathering more stories when umpiring. This was done by creating a written record of past stories and finding and making a record of new stories while umpiring baseball at the collegiate and national level. I have been teaching mathematics at the post secondary level for the last 38 years. I have also been involved in baseball for most of my 67 years, about 40 of those years as a major college baseball umpire where I umpired 20 NCAA Division I regional tournaments, three superregional tournaments and the College World Series two times and at the professional level (National League) a couple of times. Throughout this lengthy career, I gathered numerous stories to share (See Appendix A). Here are three abbreviated sample stories used: 1. The pitching coach at WSU, while objecting to my strike zone, kicked dirt on the entire plate. He proceeded to uncover a two inch space down the middle of the plate and commented that was my strike zone! What percentage of the plate did he uncover? 2. While umpiring a major league game, Davey Johnson the manager of Cincinnati, questioned why a pitch was not called a strike which would have resulted in strike three. The batter hit the next pitch for a home run. Between innings, I asked him if he would agree that the limit of the slope of a secant, as delta x approached zero, was equal to the slope of the tangent. The pitch was close to being a strike and I immediately made a calculus problem out of it. Obviously, he was totally confused. The story goes on! 3. While umpiring a game in California, I called a runner out on a play at first base while the replay showed he was a full step by the bag. When the manager approached me and asked why, I responded that I thought he was coming from the other direction. I immediately made this a “one sided limit problem in calculus.” I confused him but P ge 15107.4 while telling the story in class, I gained the interest of the students and they understood the concept. There are other approaches to incorporating baseball into mathematics. One can use quotes from stories such as “Yogism's” that relate to mathematics and problem solving skills. For example, when telling the Yogism “it ain’t over till it’s over”, one can share with students how they use mathematics all their lives. Or the Yogism “We make too many wrong mistakes” relates to mathematics because students do many things intuitively that are wrong rather than making decisions based on facts. Each Yogism is different. Yogi once said “There are some people who, if they don't already know, you can't tell 'em.” This applies in mathematics because students sometimes say “Leave me alone. I’ll do it my way. This is how I learned it in high school,” 13 When teaching mathematics, I interject some story, or some event, or some history almost on a da