Dashiell Young-Saver is a Texas based high school stats teacher. While teaching at a Title 1 school on the southside of San Antonio, Dash threw out his traditional AP Stats curriculum and created lessons on topics his students cared about: voter power, food deserts, the Spurs’s chance at winning the NBA title, online dating, and more. That year, more students at the school took and passed the AP exam than in the previous 16 years combined. Borrowing from his class motto of “skew the script,” Young-Saver created this website and posted his lessons online for free. Now, he leads Skew The Script’s efforts to provide relevant math lessons to classrooms across the country.
Episode Description
Stats educators are continually looking for ways to get students excited about the subject and help them understand all stats can help them do. One high school educator discovered one way to do that was to throw out a standard curriculum and connect lessons more closely to student interests. That's the focus of this episode of stats and stories with guest Dashiell Young-Saver .
+Full Transcript
Rosemary Pennington
Stats educators are continually looking for ways to get students excited about the subject and help them understand all stats can help them do. One high school educator discovered one way to do that was to throw out a standard curriculum and connect lessons more closely to student interests. That's the focus of this episode of stats and stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. Stats and stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media, journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is right. Joining me is regular panelist John Baylor emeritus professor of statistics at Miami University. Our guest today is Dashiell young saver. Young saver is a Texas based High School stats teacher while teaching at a title one school on the south side of San Antonio dashed throughout his traditional AP Stats curriculum, and created lessons on topics his students cared about voter power food deserts, the Spurs chance of winning the NBA title. That year, more students at the school took and passed the AP exam than in the previous 16 years. Borrowing from his class motto of skew the script, young saver created the skew the script website and posted his lessons online for free. Now he leads skew the scripts efforts to provide relevant math lessons to classrooms across the country. He also writes math lessons for the New York Times DASCH, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for having me. I want to ask you about that moment before you throughout the curriculum, what made you what brought you to that point where you're like, I just gotta try something else? Yeah.
Dashiell Young-Saver
So a lot of my students were bored in class. And I think a lot of teachers can relate to this. You look out at your class. And after reading out some textbook problem on like, the heights and weights of kids and finding the mean and seeing if it's unusual.
Most of the kids heads are down the desks, and there's drool coming out of their mouths. And I students because they're working jobs outside of school, they're supporting their family. They had real complex adult problems on their shoulders day to day. And the examples that we're giving them were contrived, and almost infantilizing. And so I just wanted to ask my students, okay, what do you all actually want to learn about? And that's when they told me all these topics that are now infused into the curriculum?
John Bailer
So I'm curious, what was the first lesson that you built?
Dashiell Young-Saver
On my own? Yeah,
John Bailer
but based on based on the feedback from your students as first time? Yeah,
Dashiell Young-Saver
I think the one that comes to mind as like the first true lesson created in this frame was a lesson that we still have on the website, on income segregation in the city of San Antonio. And this is something that a student brought in like an article about how San Antonio is one of the most income segregated cities in the country. And so we intrusion AP Stats, there's a couple of activities out there to explore sampling. One of them probably the most famous one is called the jelly blubber activity, where you have a bunch of jellyfish on the page, and you sample them in different ways to get the average size of the jellyfish and your estimates of the average size of jellyfish differs based on the sampling methods that you use. And the first year that I use that it was, you know, drool on the desk, bored out their minds, and not to dismiss the activity, it's a very good activity. And it it demonstrates the concept very well. But for the students, my classroom, it just wasn't, didn't feel very relevant. And so I made this activity where I use census data to create a map of the city of San Antonio. And we use different ways to sample the median income in the city. And if you do a cluster sample of different neighborhoods versus if you stratify your sample by race versus if you do other sorts of sampling methods, you're gonna get very different estimates of median income in the city. And then that led into a discussion of school finance, and what's the most fair way to do school finance based on differences in neighborhood incomes. And we have this great nonpartisan discussion about trade offs between different sorts of systems where you're either doing balancing of funding or non balancing of funding based on what students think is most fair.
Rosemary Pennington
That's great, and it makes me think a lot I've talked about this a lot on this podcast, but like I was one of those children who in math or stats classes would often just sort of find myself so completely bored because it felt so abstract and I have always been the kind of person Who, if you can tell me the concrete reason I have to do something I'm much more engaged than sort of the abstract. And I know there are people who live in the abstract that is just not my brain. And I wonder. And this sort of resonates for me, because that's sort of when when I was in grad school, and I started doing these stats, and I'm like, This is how I have to use it for my research. I'm like, Oh, yes, this is amazing. I love everything that I'm doing now. What were your what were your students responses as you were developing these lessons that were sort of coming from their interests and sort of tying it back to their lives?
Dashiell Young-Saver
Yeah, I think that it's so unfortunate that so many people have such a bad experience in their stats classes, whether that's in college and grad school or in high school. And I think that partly comes from the fact that most people who end up becoming statistics instructors are the people who really like math for math sake, and really embrace that. And they rinse and repeat with stats in and of itself is a beautiful thing. And I think that is true to some extent. But there's a reason that stats as a discipline exists. It's not to study stats, it's to study the world. And the more that we can bring in the world, to our stats classes, and to our math classes, the more compelling it's going to be for students. And I think the first reactions I would get it I was getting was just excitement. longer discussions, students saying after the bell to chat more, and after time, more and more higher test scores, which was the thing that I think was most surprising was seeing how the boosted engagement led to students taking the time to do some more studying at home taking the time to really understand deeply what was going on behind the problems, rather than just completing worksheets for compliance. Like,
John Bailer
you know, I want to hear you describe this, it sounds like just such a beautiful feedback loop. I mean, I'm sure you were having more fun teaching at that point. Oh,
Dashiell Young-Saver
definitely. And I think this is something we hear from teachers who use our stuff is that it doesn't just make math more compelling for students, it makes math more compelling for teachers too. And I think that as a set math teacher, into this game, because we love math, and that can sometimes feel so draining to be in front of a room that doesn't feel that same innate love of math as a discipline. And the more we can share that love of math via the things that students already care about, the more we're all together in this, the more we feel like we're doing this together, there is something useful in this that we're taking to all of our interests, and we're going to have fun, we're going to have also meaningful discussions. And it's going to be really purposeful in that classroom.
John Bailer
You know, I was in one of the interviews, you were quoted that I read in preparation for our chat today, you were quoted as saying marching through the syllabus, rather than engaging with the math was that was was to be covered that that's sort of a different, you know, this epiphany and I, I remember having a similar epiphany in terms of when I was teaching and watching the drool form on the desks as well, you know, and, you know, if you want to stop a conversation, what do you do for a living? I teach statistics, and you just see people say, Oh, that's Wait, that's my phone, you know, so. So you, I know exactly what you're saying. But But one thing that I thought about was that you have to change hearts before you change heads. And it seems like what that you've what you're doing with these problems is you're you're immediately saying what is it what's important to you as a student? And then sort of building on that? So so as you think about framing a lesson, can you talk about kind of the ingredients of of what a lesson plan looks like once you've identified a topic that you think is going to have pretty broad appeal to the students?
Dashiell Young-Saver
Definitely. So every lesson, if you look on this huge group website is a narrative. It's not a lesson that teaching is a method. It's a narrative that tells a story. And that has math or statistics involved that is necessary in order to get to the climax and resolution of that story. And so I think, where a lot of people go wrong, and trying to make math relevant or trying to make statistics relevant is that they try and force contexts into math. For example, like one example I always give is, you might look at a textbook problem that's trying to be quote unquote, relevant like this is a Wakanda require the help little black panther and the Black Panther is gonna get on time to the scene of a crime 20% of the time, if there were this many crimes, how many times it's contrived, and soon as though it's contrived and, and you get the same result, which is that students are bored and it comes off as just not real. If you can make problems, where students need the tools that you're teaching them in order to get new, genuine insight into an issue they care about. All of a sudden, math is not just a thing that you added on top of the context, it is a driver of the context, and it's something worth learning is something compelling. And so what we do in every lesson is we have a key question. Like, for example, does your vote matter? And then we explore that key question using different methods. And in this lesson, does your vote matter? We explore gerrymandering through sampling distributions. And you need to have the sampling distributions in the simulation that we built in order to see if your vote actually does make a difference. Or if your vote is in a district that might be kind of diminishing your voice due to voter power distortions. And then students can get a whole new sense of whether or not their vote matters. And that's a question that my students asked me that when I pulled them procedure, like, Does my vote actually matter? And that was a way to answer that question, in a way that if they didn't have that piece of math, they didn't have sampling distributions they otherwise might not be able to answer in the same way. And then at the end of lesson we talked about, okay, well, the Supreme Court has gone back and forth on gerrymandering, what kind of standard could we make, so that we can make sure votes really do matter across districts, and you get this resolution of the narrative. And we often add in all sorts of different examples, like, for example, in that lesson we talked about Texas is different districts that my students are in and other districts that have been gerrymandered over time, and the history behind them and the stories behind them. And adding the stories just really adds to the context. And more fun examples that we might look at individuals. So for example, we have a lesson on Simpsons paradox. And we have two WMV players in the Las Vegas Vegas aces team. And we talked about the background, those players how one is a tall center, and one short shooting guard, and that they both are all star players. And that's why the Las Vegas aces have done so well, in recent years winning the titles. And we talked about well, one player has a higher overall shooting percentage, and the other player has a higher two point shooting percentage and a higher 3.7. shooting percentage. How is that possible? It seems like once and then you have to use the math to wait tables conditional probability to get to the answer of how to solve that paradox. And so the story, the narrative the talking about those players are talking about the team winning these tails, a talking about these mixing of skills leads into them, that becoming you're playing context, whereas the student who might not know a lot about basketball or might not follow the WNBA might play otherwise turned out. You're
Rosemary Pennington
listening to stats and stories. And today we're talking with Dash young saver about skew the script. I want to ask about that motto skew the script and the name of the project. Where did that come from? And why is that been the framing of this for you?
Dashiell Young-Saver
Yeah, it's funny people take it a lot of different ways that weren't the original intent. But I think
Rosemary Pennington
that's always how it happens. Right?
Dashiell Young-Saver
And I think so the way it all started was in my class, I was very asked my students, and I talked to them about how expectations for them in our district were quite low. To give you a sense of those expectations. Nationally, about 60% of students pass the AP Stats exam year on year. In my district, traditionally, the pass rate was hovering at about 2% Oh motto out 2%, relative to 60. And I would talk to district leaders about this. And there's a lot of movement towards Well, we're just not gonna be successful AP, let's move to dual credit row things that, in my view, are just kind of lowering expectations. And I told my students, there's a script written about you, the script written about you is that you're not going to do well on this exam, because of where you come from, and that you're not capable of passing this very hard test. And that script, if you look at it in terms of data is a right skew, where most of the data is on the left a lot of ones and twos on the exam, and very few data on the right, very few three fours and fives and we're going to skew the script the other way. We're going to make a left skew has a lot of highest scores and few low scores. And that's why you see on the website, the logo has left skewed distribution. So we're skewing the script the other way. And that became our motto, I started putting it the top right hand corner of all of our class handouts. It doesn't look as well designed as it does now. But I still have that. And students bought in and we were all about skipping the script. There is also I think, partway through the first year, I really did this, I noticed there was a bit of insidious thing going on, that I hadn't realized, as an educator is doing, which is, students with this kind of language sort of internalizing a lot of pressure, based on the idea that, you know, there is a script written about them, and they need to do better on the exam in order to, to fight off that stereotype. And it was creating, I think, some undue pressure. That made this high stakes three hour tests that in the years seemed like such a do or die thing. And that was something that as an educator, you know, I was trying to get them hyped for the exam, I didn't foresee the consequence of making it, a very nerve wracking thing. And so, over time I started talking about well, also just know that this, your performance on this one, three hour test is not a determinant of who you are, or where you want to go in life. Everything that we've done this year, party all been working, how much improvement I've seen on your all's exams in here already, but more importantly, how much I've seen you all, think critically about real issues that matter and develop these skills and also develop work habits that will help the rest of your life, that is skewing the script that is already stuff that is going to help you for the rest of your life as already breaking all sorts of norms and what people thought you were capable of. And no matter what the three hour test says about you just know that that stuff is really what matters. You
John Bailer
know, I really liked the the figures and I, I when I was teaching, I would give my students three different distributions. And I would ask them to argue for which grade distribution did they want to be for the class? And, and you know, someone say, Nora was that really you want, you know, you want you want everything you want A's to be as likely as F's. No, well, so I love this, the way that you visualize this and shaped that story. They, when I, when I looked at the the mission statement associated with with your efforts in this project, you know, this idea of of bettering, engagement and achievement among students and and these with that have been underserved, in some sense by the educational systems in particularly, and in maths sciences, but also preparing students to think critically as citizens. I mean, both these really, really resonate, I think that are, you know, the name of our podcasts that some stories is really both celebrating the importance of narrative, as well as the the the, the story elements that are this the methods that you use to understand the world in which we live. So I was really, really impressed by that. So what what led you to kind of narrowing on those two components as your mission.
Dashiell Young-Saver
So the first part of the mission, boosting engagement and achievement among students from Trishy underserved backgrounds, that is kind of the story of my own classroom and what we were trying to do those first set of years, among students who had been underserved by the school system, they were attending and through no fault of their own, felt a bit behind. And those were students who were so incredibly capable, so incredibly talented, have worked so incredibly hard and did much better on standardized tests that we had relative to others before them, but also now have gone off and majored in data science and then gone off and, and study these things and gone off and used data to empower their voices in various ways. And so that first part of mission is pretty much tied to that. And what we've done is spread the curriculum across many classrooms across the country, including a lot in Title One schools, where teachers find that among students who are facing similar issues, the students that I was serving, where they're working jobs outside of school or in their family have complex adult problems in their daily lives that they're, they're dealing with. Talking about real issues in passing that real topics is simply more compelling than talking about your more contrived examples that you find in typical text. The other part of the mission was more of a surprise to me after launching the site, and this initial spread of the site was in and of itself a big surprise. So within like, a couple of weeks of me putting up the site upset, we had a few 1000 Teachers signed up downloading the lessons. Now we have 20,000 teachers, and it's good hadn't spent any money on marketing. This is all just word of mouth teacher to teacher, using the lessons, liking the lesson, the sharing with other teachers. The first summer that I launched the site, which was like, summer 2020 Peak pandemic time, I got an email from the Exeter boarding school up in New Hampshire, you know, the Harvard feeder, yeah. And they were starting to use our lessons. And all of a sudden, you have my students on the south side of San Antonio, using the same lessons talking about the same issues using statistics and data as the students of the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. And they're all developing this common language through math to talk about issues that matter. A lot of them issues that my own students personally face and maybe in our context, issues that students haven't personally face, but are interested in exploring more about. And I think that the goal is among all students from all backgrounds to give them a more compelling version of stats and math that, that talks about issues that no matter where you're coming from, you're going to have to be thinking about because they apply to everyday life and what you're thinking about when you enter a voting booth, what you're thinking about, when you read the news, what you're thinking about all the time, and we live in such a divided time. I know it's a bit contrived to say, but it is true. And and we all feel it. And the more that we can teach future citizens how to distinguish between correlation and causation, how to evaluate for bias or an unbiased sample how to look at a graph in their Twitter feed and see if it's misleading or not. The more that I think we can create a citizenry that that can really attenuate to what is real, what is not what is signal, what is noise, and move forward through this era of complex information that has led many people to be misled.
John Bailer
You know, I really love that, that this has shown that you're doing both algebra one, Algebra Two and AP stat and covered in this. And, you know, I went and I signed up as a teacher on your site, and I've been playing with some of the lessons and I really love the electric car versus gasoline car comparison question because I, I can well imagine the student thinking about what am I going to purchase? You know, if I'm going to be in this time, what does it mean to purchases? What are breakevens for costs? What's the environmental impact? And I, I love that there's this this element of both the this this lovely introduction, the video introduction to the story, but then then sort of bringing it forward and saying, okay, support your decision. How do you how do you understand and it's all motivated, but now it's Yeah, y equals mx plus b is this is the slope equation, that's, that's kind of this generic thing that students have been bludgeoned with for for many, many years. But but the fact that you're talking about sort of initial costs and annual costs, and you're translating it into things that really resonate, I, I just applaud you for that. And I, I want to know, what, what lesson is this, our students most surprised, by the, by the conclusion that they might draw from the analysis that they do, you've got these, this collection and all these different areas? I'm just wondering if there's one that they go, Wow, I didn't, you know, sort of in the electric car, when I'm thinking it's gonna take me like 1010 years to before the cost of operations breaks even or that maybe a year in terms of environmental impact. But But what are some of the are there? They're the ones that the students go, No way, you know, how could that be?
Dashiell Young-Saver
That's a great question that I think to most immediately come to mind. One is in the algebra curriculum, we have a lesson on student loans and compound interest. And the hook for the lesson is a tweet made by a person I think her name was Sarah. And she's just tweeted out, Hey, I have and I'm not gonna be able to get the numbers off top my head right now. But there's something like, Hey, I took out about 30,000 in loans. I've paid $20,000 off of it. How much do I still owe? And we blacked out the number she puts at the bottom and students make guesses and the most obvious guessing you take 30,000 is 20,000. You got 10,000 left, and the amount she actually owes left to something like $45,000. And the compound interests for loan has ramped up so much that slow payments over time were unable to outpace the amount of interest that she was getting. And she is, even though has made all the payments owes more than the initial principal amount. And it's a really good window for students into the carefulness with which they need to make decisions about. Where do I go to college? And how do I pay for it? And if I do take out a loan, what do I do with paying it off quickly versus not quickly. And that's a big shocking moment for them. Another one that is really, I think surprising to them is, we have this lesson, the stats curriculum on attendance and test scores. And we talked about how attendance in school is one of the strongest predictors of students test scores across school systems. And that's for like, middle school, high school, etc. And because of that, all these school districts have started these big, sometimes very expensive attendance initiatives where they have like call programs for absent students. They have attendance case managers, sometimes they're even like Uber lifting students to school who otherwise didn't make the bus or something like that. And after these initiatives, a lot of studies have found is that even though attendance improved a lot, test scores stayed flat. escorts stay flat. And that's a big surprise for them. Because the whole lesson, we talked about the strength of correlation and modeling the correlation and making our formula for getting the R value in the R squared value is so strong, and then you improve the attendance and nothing happens, why? How could that be? And then we get into the reveal for the lesson, which is, well, it could be that attendance is causing test scores to go up or down. Or it could be a third common cause between attendance and test scores. For example, if you experienced poverty, maybe you're also experiencing hunger, have less study time outside of school, and those things are affecting your test scores. And at the same time, you might not be able to attend school as often because you might not have transportation. So there's underlying variables simultaneously causing both things. And so you can fix the attendance. But if you're not fixing some of those underlying issues, we're helping students overcome those underlying issues like The Hunger like having less lead time through other initiatives, you might not be driving up the test scores. And unlike the typical correlation, causation examples, which is like you know, drownings and ice cream or whatever, this is something that's going to be a bit more subtle, and really take students by a genuine surprise, rather than kind of a more fun, but somewhat more contrived surprise.
Rosemary Pennington
What's next for skew the script.
Dashiell Young-Saver
So we have been lucky enough to receive some funding to do some bigger projects, and we're very excited about them. One big thing we're hoping to do is expand the film. And our vision is to make relevant math lessons free to teachers, for all secondary grade levels, middle through high school, that's the eventual goal. And we're starting with doing a revamp of our algebra materials this year, eventually, we're gonna move after that into precalc. And then into other rhythms in high school, and then eventually get down into middle school. But we want to create a site where if you're a math teacher teaching any kind of secondary math, there is a set of free to access lessons, take the stuff that you're already teaching, and make it feel a bit more relevant. That's the big goal. And there's a lot of things to do in the meantime to get there. But that's that's the big hope. Well,
Rosemary Pennington
thank you so much for taking time to talk with us today. This is so interesting, and I can't wait to get on the site and dig around because I will also register as a teacher. And look at these lessons. I will not be teaching them but they might be helpful for my own edification.
Dashiell Young-Saver
Thank you all so much for your time. Great questions I really appreciate
Rosemary Pennington
Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of Stats and Stories. Good luck getting it through Congress. I will definitely be watching it as it moves through, hopefully, both houses. Thank you both so much for being here today. Donna and Steve. Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University's Department of Statistics and media, journalism and film and to the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter @StatsandStories, Apple podcast, or other places where you find podcasts. If you'd like to share your thoughts on the program, send your email to statsandstories@miami.oh.edu, or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.