Teaching
“ The students did a fabulous job of creating , illustrating , and annotating a brief narrative of their chosen topic ,” says Pfenning , “ including a judicious number of relevant statistical charts that they clearly understood in the context of voting inequities .”
The Plural of “ Anecdote ”
Pfenning earned a PhD in mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh . She expected to teach calculus at Pitt but found that the department needed someone to teach statistics .
“ I realized that teaching stats can be much more fulfilling than teaching calc because there ’ s such a vast number of real-life applications ,” she says . “ With statistics , you can get into meaningful examples in all walks of life that help you to reach students ’ interests .”
After a rich teaching career — Pfenning even wrote a textbook , “ Elementary Statistics : Looking at the Big Picture ”— she retired in 2018 . It was then that Pfenning developed an honors course called Patients in Literature ’ s Pages that drew on sources such as short stories to gain a deeper understanding of medical conditions .
“ I always taught students that it ’ s wrong to say the plural of ‘ anecdote ’ is ‘ data ,’” she says , but both she and the students found that anecdotal evidence was an extremely effective way to learn more deeply about the medical conditions explored in the course .
She credits that experience with paving the way for her current work creating curricula for KIPP .
“ It shouldn ’ t just be about a data set about the whole country ,” she says . “ It ’ s important to intersperse data with primary sources and remind students that the voters we ’ re summarizing were real people .”
A Repeat Collaboration
Her work in Wittig ’ s classroom is actually Pfenning ’ s second collaboration with a Falk teacher . In 2022-23 , she worked with science teacher Alex Dragon on a sixth-grade unit related to radiocarbon dating that culminated in a class field trip to Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village . Like the voting unit , the curriculum incorporated representations of data into a cohesive narrative to teach both content and data literacy .
That unit was created for Meadowcroft after Pfenning met the site ’ s director , who wondered how to teach students about radiocarbon dating . Pfenning read dozens of research papers about all sorts of archaeological evidence from the site and divided the evidence about Paleo-Indian occupation of the shelter into a series of topics .
“ Rather than doing a chronology , let ’ s look at what you learn from modified bone artifacts ,” she says , “ or let ’ s look at ceramics or see what you find from evidence of trees and other plants .”
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