Jenni White, Evanston, WY jenniwhite@cpm.org
Hearing the words “AP Statistics” can bring paroxysms of joy or tremors of fear. Statistics seem to be a subject that math educators either love or hate. Hopefully, now that CPM has created a student-centered, problem-based AP Statistics course, students and teachers will no longer see Statistics as a fear inducing topic, but one that should be at the top of high school math education.
When I was asked to teach AP Statistics for the first time, I knew it would be a daunting task. I had not used statistics in anything but the most meager of situations since my singular statistics class during my under-grad ages ago. All that I remembered was that I liked it and that I made a lot of money tutoring nurses! Jumping into ogives, t-tests, and chi-tests was scary! While I would like to think that I did okay, I know that if I had other teachers to talk to, I would have done better than “okay”. Luckily, I have had the opportunity! I have been able to reach out to other CPM AP Stats teachers, and of course, they are amazing!
One way that CPM Statistics teachers can connect is with the online community platform Slack. Slack allows people to message others about specific topics; of course, the CPM Stats Slack is all about teachers who use the CPM book to teach statistics. Inside the main platform, teachers can add their thoughts, tips, and problems to different hashtags for other people to find and add to. The current hashtags are: #2020ap-stats-changes, #general, #projects, and #random. Any user can add a hashtag line and any user can join any of the hashtags. This makes it easy to organize things; if you are not interested in a particular tag, just don’t follow it! Users can also message other users privately through the work space.
Currently, there are not very many teachers on the Slack CPM Stats community. We would love to hear your voice! Please join us by sending me an e-mail; I will send you a Slack invite. I look forward to seeing you there!