Statistics and Trigonometry: why not teach both?

by Will Zahary Henderson

September 14, 2020

In the Alberta curriculum, there are two popular 12th grade mathematics classes: Math 30-1, and Math 30-2. The former is largely concerned with precalculus topics such as trigonometry, while the latter places a greater emphasis on applications of math concepts. In fact, the courses used to be called “Pure Mathematics” and “Applied Mathematics,” respectively.

Though there certainly is merit in dividing the course into two to fit each student’s academic abilities, why do we make such a distinction between applied and pure mathematics as though students should only be learning one? Why does the Math 30-1 curriculum contain nothing close to statistics? The course that optionally follows Math 30-1, still taken by many students in the province, is Math 31, an introductory calculus class that roughly matches the Calculus 1 curriculum at many post-secondary institutions. Though this class is a great, logical way to follow, statistics still remains out of sight.

The truth is, there are few students in high school who know much about statistics past the basic probability ratios taught in junior high. This is not their fault; it is unreasonable to expect busy students to perform their own research on mathematical topics outside of school. Often, when I bring up the possibility of adding statistics to the curriculum with fellow students, I hear “well, we will learn statistics in university, right?” and this is not pulled out of nowhere; many students do need to take statistics in university. But why do we expect students to wait until their adult lives to learn what normal distribution is? Why do we not teach our students what a bell curve is before they are graded on one? Why are proper statistical inferences not taught?

As they grow older, students become more and more concerned with issues around the world: politics, economics, and recently, epidemiology, have all become topics of interest for students among my age group. This is wonderful. However, without a proper foundation of statistics, it becomes drastically easier to believe falsities or come to illogical inferences based on data. Obviously, a statistics class can not be expected to solve all of this, but having students think a certain way would surely encourage them to apply principles of statistical inference to their everyday reasoning.

In case it is not obvious at this point, I believe there should be a statistics class in the high school curriculum. Currently, it is not abnormal for eleventh and twelfth graders to take more than one science class concurrently, and it would not be much different if a statistics class were to be added to follow Math 20. The beauty of introductory statistics, in fact, is that it requires little foundational knowledge; the importance would lay not in the memorization of the term “sample variance,” nor in the ability to calculate standard deviation by hand, but rather in the thought processes that accompany statistics. In fact, you might as well call the class applied epistemology.

Though I do not plan on going in-depth about the possible course content in this post, I plan on doing so in the future. In the meantime, if you are a high school student with any interest in statistical inference, data analysis, or any similar topic, I highly suggest doing some research on statistics. A great place to start is my favorite book, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, editor-in-chief of FiveThirtyEight. If you are not into books, check out 3blue1brown’s YouTube channel; he has got some great videos explaining Bayes’ Theorem and Binomial Distribution.