New math, thanks to the mercenary NFL fans

When you crunch all the numbers, it adds up to a brilliant, albeit, shortsighted method of madness.
Teaching math to a bunch of high school students using NFL Fantasy Football as a basis ... well, is that just advancing the idea of gambling, or turning it into an educational opportunity?
A story in Monday's San Jose Mercury News tells the tale of John Hagen, a math teacher at Foothill High in San Jose, who uses NFL rushing, passing and scoring stats to teach algebra to a bunch of students who otherwise wouldn't know how to apply their knowledge to something more productive.
Hagen's "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" tactic certainly make his job easier, and makes him kind of the cool teacher on campus. But there's the big picture to look at here: Fantasy football isn't just a nickle-and-dime pasttime.
Said 17-year-old Jessica Zamora in the story: ``You don't really look at it as math that much because you're doing sports."
We can appreciate thinking outside the box when teachers look for ways to connect to students.We did a story awhile back about Dr. Timothy Gay, a physics professor at the University of Nebraska who used situations from a football game to explain things like force, inertia, speed and thrust. That makes sense.
We just wouldn't be comfortable if our daughter came home and spent all her Sundays in front of the TV wondering how Peyton Manning did and told us it was part of her math homework.
ESPN's "Outside The Lines" will tackle this subject on Sunday (6:30 a.m., with a replay at 9 a.m. on ESPNEWS), citing a study conducted by the federal government that shows 83% of the eighth-graders in large U.S.
cities are not considered proficient in math.
“Their attitude about school is just a lot better," says New Jersey eighth-grade teacher Robert Creamer in the ESPN story, which you can also view online by clicking here. "I’ll come in here nine in the morning I’ll have six kids lined up
outside my room: 'Can I get on your laptop to see how so and so (my player) did?'�