A cartoon in my 8th grade math textbook in a different country made the notions of Mean, Median and Mode stick in my mind, and pointed toward the significance of these different measures of central tendency. Can't remember any author or title of that old textbook, unfortunately, but here's a reconstructed version assembled with tools from
ToonDoo. I used this with my Algebra classes a week ago.
Referring to "Secretary 1" in the salary scale as "the favorite secretary" also generated some discussion about which if these measures of central tendency says anything interesting about the data and about our research question, which is whether this employer pays his subordinates decently.
5 comments:
Great re-creation! I think I've seen the idea expressed in a similar way, but this one is funny!
Thanks, Jonathan :)
Hey, was going to comment the other day when you posted this, but was busy putting it into my lesson. You were one of my links in a technology presentation and your post couldn't have been more timely. And, I loved your comic.
Thanks, e :) The reason why it was ever posted here was that Todd asked for info about mean, median and mode - otherwise it would have stayed among my private files. You have to like an English teacher who doesn't go "Oh, yeah, I hated math too, and never was any good at it" when students are confused about their computations.
i find this comic very interesting! but after looking at it more.. i realise there is a slight problem... The mode of the salary is still $20 000. It's because it appeared 3 times in the salary. So.. actually Mr. Stingy wouldnt have to look so guilty.. because he would still be able to hide it.
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