What makes you the best?
It is incredible how difficult that simple question is.
For many professions, the answer does seem simple. The best businessmen make the most money. The best lawyers win the most cases. The best engineers produce the simplest, most cost-effective solutions. For nearly any profession, the best are rewarded with the best contracts, the best opportunities, the most fame. Of course, there really is no profession that works quite as hard at identifying and rewarding the best than professional sports. In particular, professional baseball.
Baseball is the statistician’s dream. Every little action in baseball is calculated, quantified, accumulated, averaged, and dissected. I guess there’s something to be said for a sport that not only provides sample sizes so huge that margins of error diminish to negligence (who else plays a game almost half of the days of the calendar year?) but also provides so frequent pauses in the action that you literally have nothing better to do than math? Scoring a baseball game during the actual event is a time honored tradition passed down from father to son for generations. When was the last time you saw a young boy at a basketball or football stadium calculating the results of each play? But I digress…
In the world of baseball statistics, there are calculations of nearly every action taken on, and sometimes even off of the field. Yet, the sole point of all of these statistics, all of the innumerable hours of calculating, are designed to answer one simple question: who is the best? ERA (Earned Run Average) tells you which pitcher is able to give up the least runs, certainly a useful skill for the guy holding the ball at the start of each play. But, is a pitcher really that good if he has to rely on amazing defensive plays by those around him to keep everyone from scoring? We look to DICE (Defense-Independent Component ERA) to show how well the pitcher pitches without the help of his teammates. Still, a pitcher that gets a lot of double plays is a pitcher that can get a ground ball in the right situation, and that’s got to be a valuable skill, right? So, why don’t we compare that pitcher to all the other pitchers in the league who’ve benefited or been hindered by the unique dimensions and quirks of a certain ballpark or league? No problem! Just use ERA+. And this is only a few of the stats kept on one of 10 baseball positions (9 in the National League, of course)!
With all this, there is one statistic that stands out to me above all others. WAR. Huh? Yeah. Good god, ya’ll, what is it good for? Well, it is good for trying to measure one player against the imaginary guy who could take his job at any minute. WAR, or Wins Against Replacement, is essentially a statistic that pits your real flesh and blood player’s statistics against a fictitious “replacement.” This statistical chimera is given a set of statistics considered to be slightly below average for a big league player, and then, through the magic of fuzzy math, you find out if your real life player is helping your team to win more games or less than some bum you just pulled out of the minors would.
What a fascinating concept! Could you imagine it being applied to any other field? I have to say that there is a small part of me that would love to slip into Dunder Mifflin and explain to Dwight that his attitude is costing his company six sales per season over the other employee they could’ve hired. Something tells me this wouldn’t sit too well on the Schrute Beet Farm.
Fortunately for us all, there really aren’t those kind of statistics out there. We don’t necessarily have the data to say to a teacher, “Your replacement would have brought three less students all the way to graduation, congrats!” But for discussion’s sake, the question of how we could ever measure that is valid. Shoot, in today’s political climate, it seems to be more important than ever to prove that a teacher is doing their job “above replacement.”
So, this is the beginning of a series of discussions about, essentially, creating a WAR for teachers, and how to stay on the positive end of the results. What statistics could be used? Where can teachers be measured, and what measurement is desirable? Are the best teachers like pornography, or can we actually find a way to define it before we see it? How do you measure the best teacher, and more importantly, how do you live up to those measurements.
A good baseball player will go to his batting coach and take some extra practice swings when he sees his batting average turn south. Is there a tool, or tools out there, that can warn a teacher when they’re off their game? Is there a teaching cage to go to for practice? Is there a coach in the wings?
This is what I want to know: what makes the “best” teacher? How do I get there? How do I stay there once I do? How can I help others along the same path?
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