Your fantasy team's third baseman stinks and your pitching staff is tanking. That's OK, JENNIFER HOLLAND discovers, as long as you're learning your algebra.
Eighth-grade teacher Jessica Bogie has always loved math and the Chicago Cubs, so it was natural to combine her two passions in the classroom.
When students return from spring break on Monday, they'll join the big leagues of fantasy baseball, drafting real players and tracking their performances to earn points.
Like other teachers across the country, Bogie has turned to author Dan Flockhart's series of books on fantasy sports and mathematics that help motivate students to tackle fractions, decimals, algebra and statistics.
The lessons lie in the calculation of their scores using the statistics of real major league baseball players as the season progresses -- everything from batting average and home runs for hitters to wins, saves and ERA for pitchers.
"It shows the kids the math behind the scenes," Bogie said the program. "That's why I like it -- because they're doing it all by hand."
Students are given a "budget" to buy and trade real athletes, and follow the results in the daily news.
"It's based on real-world data," he said. "Unfortunately, what millions of students are getting is repetition out of boring text books."
FROM LIVING ROOM TO CLASSROOM
Flockhart has played fantasy sports with a bunch of his friends since the late '70s, before the Internet kept track of players and computed scores. In those days, fantasy baseball players had to glean everything from a newspaper -- and use simple algebra whether they liked it or not.
He introduced fantasy football to his middle school math students in the 1990s, and the idea took off from there.
"By the time we got to the third week the kids were just running into the room and they'd yell at 'Hey, can we play fantasy football today?'" Flockhart said.
"Motivation is half the battle when you're teaching middle school math, so I knew I was doing something right," he said.
Flockhart, who taught math in the San Francisco area for 11 years, shared his lesson plans when he published his first book for fantasy football in 2005. The instant demand led to similar books for fantasy basketball, baseball and soccer.
BEEFING UP THE AVERAGE
Most of Bogie's students at Scullen Middle School in Naperville, Ill., have already struck out in math and need her extra help to get them ready for high school. The seven-year veteran educator said fantasy baseball, along with other teaching methods, has improved test scores.
"It has more of an affect on their attitudes toward math and the way they go about thinking or attempting a problem," Bogie said. "That's what I think is the biggest bonus, is that it's making them comfortable with math and enjoying it and not hating it."
Aside from enticing them to class, fantasy baseball also encourages students to do their homework.
"I had a lot of parents e-mail me and say it was a great way to open up communication up at home," she said.
CO-ED LEARNING
There's not much difference in excitement between the genders, either.
"The girls got involved because they just wanted to beat the boys to prove they could do it," Bogie said.
Flockhart said it's more than the competition that knocks the math lesson out of the park.
"The games," he said, "they allow students to have autonomy. So many adolescents are craving independence, but they feel that their lives are pretty controlled by teachers and parents."
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Visit the curriculum's Web site at: http://www.fantasysportsmath.com.
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asap contributor Jennifer Holland is an editor on the AP's national desk in New York.
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