May 27, 2012

-Chris Barker, Ph.D. President, San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of the American Statistical Association

San Francisco Bay Area Chapter Volunteers Visit AP Statistics Classes

The San Francisco Bay Area chapter contacted Bay Area AP statistics teachers in 2011 and 2012 and announced that chapter volunteers were available to visit AP statistics classes and give a one-hour lecture on careers in statistics or other statistics topic to students.

Our inaugural effort in 2011 taught us that AP teachers and students were very busy with the AP curriculum from the first class of the year up until the AP statistics exam, in early May. Our invitations to visit classes arose after the exam and until the end of the school year. We also learned that there was no publicly available list of AP statistics teachers. We contacted our chapter members, emailed a few teachers, whose names we could find on a high school website, and relied on networking with teachers who attended our inaugural AP statistics course (AMSTAT news, November 2011). Greg Whitnah and Ron Weiss AP teachers at Menlo Atherton High School teacher invited –several- chapter volunteers to return to Menlo Atherton high School in 2012. The idea of several volunteers was to give a broader perspective on careers in statistics.

It was challenging to contact AP teachers, and from the start there are more chapter volunteers than AP teachers. Over the coming years, we will continue to meet more AP statistics teachers. We also recognized that other science and math classes, may want to have a statistician visit and we extended our search to meet AP teachers. One AP teacher pointed out those AP biology students would soon be required to learn a chi-square test and other statistics.

On behalf of the officers and members of the SFBAY ASA we thank the AP teachers for the honor and invitations to visit their students, - thanks to: Rebecca Pearlman (Carlmont H.S.), Greg Whitnah, Ron Weiss (Menlo Atherton), Carolyn Gould (Aragon) and Carolyn Gilstrom (Willow Glen). We also give sincerest thanks to our volunteers, (SFBAY Past Chapter President) Carol Francisco, Doug Okamoto, Joan Skurnick, Heather Watson, and pictured below, Xiaolin Wang, Ai-Chu Wu for their volunteer efforts. In my service as Chapter President I presented at Menlo Atherton and Carlmont.

Xiaolin Wang

Ai Chu Wu

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