George Rebane
Our irrepressible Union columnist George Boardman’s Memorial Day contribution (here) took a swipe at those of us who “are always griping about the lack of emphasis on the STEM subjects, the math and science course that can get you a good paying job in our information-based economy.” It’s not clear what Mr Boardman’s position is on promoting STEM oriented curricula in secondary schools, but he does attempt to make a positive impact by suggesting that the country’s high schoolers can learn STEM stuff better if the subject matter were “framed in real life situations students can relate to.”
As an example, he cites a recent NYT article about “Calculating the Risk of Getting Shot” while attending school, and recommends that students across the country busy themselves with a “math exercise to determine the chance any given high school will be the scene of the next mass shooting?” Mr Boardman recommends this little brain teaser as the vehicle to get some math and probability learning into the little darlins’ heads since “several math concepts would be utilized in the exercise to determine the probability of a school joining the list of over 200 school shootings since the Sandy Hook massacre six years ago.”
Well, a numerate citizen would immediately realize that actually only one trivial ‘math concept’ would be used to get us the answer to this “real world math” problem. Since there has been no evidence that any particular kind of secondary school, located anywhere in the country, would be more or less likely to be “the scene of the next mass shooting”, all secondary schools have an equal opportunity of becoming the next such scene. The Dept of Education reports that there are 26,407 public high schools and 10,693 private high schools, or a total of 37,100 secondary schools in the country. Hence the probability that any given school will be next is just 1/37,100 = 0.000026954. And since there are at least hundreds of students in every such school, the probability that any given individual, such as his cited palpitating pupil, will be killed by an armed lunatic then becomes vanishingly small.
However, kids addressing this problem could learn more about propaganda and lamestream media induced histrionics – to which Mr Boardman appears to be a willing contributor – in their school shootings reports designed to abet the Left's gun control (aka constructive confiscation) agenda, than absorbing low-grade STEM concepts. For openers they could be taught about the ongoing stream of law enforcement failures that would have prevented many of these shootings, instead of being encouraged to spend time demonstrating against the NRA, the country’s leading organization teaching gun safety and promoting Second Amendment rights.
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