MMM

This morning at the breakfast table, I asked Jeremy about what he was doing in his "Math on the Menu" curriculum extension.  At first he said he was doing the same thing as in prior weeks, but then he stopped and corrected himself.

"No.  I'm doing something else.  Average, mean, and... ah... median."

"Really?  You learned about average and median?"

"Yep."

"But the average and mean are the same thing, right?" I asked.

"Ah, yes."

"So, did you learn about mean, median, and mode?"

"Oh!  Yes!  That's what it was."

"So, the mean is just the average, which is the sum of the values, divided by the number of values you have, right?"

"Yep."

"And the median is just the middle value of all the values, right?"

"Yes."

"And the mode.  Do you remember what the mode is?"

"Ah, yeah.  It's the highest number."

"It's the most frequently occurring number.  So, if you had a bunch of grades, and a lot of them were 97%, and only one was 100%, and maybe two were 95%, what is the mode?"

"100%?"

"Well, not quite.  We have lots of 97% grades...."

"Oh!  So that is the mode!"

"Yes!"  I went on to tell him about histograms and the peak of a histogram is the mode.

In nerd-land, we call all of this MMM.  I'm not sure when I learned about MMM.  High school?  College?  It most certainly wasn't in second grade!

I'm doomed.  Maybe not today, but soon, very soon....