SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Like many high schoolers, John Hagen's algebra students worry about passing.
But they also worry about rushing. And receiving. And scoring.
They've become miniature NFL coaches, tracking the performance of key players in their own fantasy football league. In the process, Hagen's previously math-resistant students have joined a growing number of kids who get a kick out of multiplying and dividing points and yards so they can see whose team came out on top.
"You don't really look at it as math that much because you're doing sports," student Jessica Zamora, 17, said.
Hagen started the fantasy league at the beginning of the year at Foothill High School, an alternative school in San Jose's East Side Union High School District. He figured it would help his students -- many of whom aren't shy about saying they don't like math -- to see fractions and equations in a new way.
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"The whole goal is for students to make connections between math at school and math in the real world," said Dan Flockhart, a former San Francisco Bay area math teacher who developed the fantasy sports curriculum that Hagen uses.
In the 1990s, Flockhart started a fantasy football league in his classroom at St. Matthew's Episcopal Day School in San Mateo, Calif.
Within weeks, something weird started to happen: The kids who didn't always turn in their homework were suddenly showing up on Monday with their assignments done.
"The kids were more excited about doing the work that was related to fantasy football than doing the work that was straight out of the textbook," said Flockhart, who lives in Fortuna, Calif., and teaches at College of the Redwoods.
Hagen found Flockhart's Web site before the start of the school year and set up a league based on his system. Each team had a budget of $42 million and a list of values for each player -- with the big-name players such as Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning and San Diego Chargers running back LaDainian Tomlinson costing the most.
Each week, the students calculate their team's points using a formula that crunches the rushing, receiving and passing yards, field goals and extra points down into one score for the week. There are more than 100 equations in Flockhart's book, each focusing on a different math concept -- fractions, exponents, factorials. A touchdown can be worth the square root of 144, he said, or 10 to the third power, depending on what concept the teachers focus on.
Hagen said his students have taken to the program -- even when he ditched the easier equation they'd been using early on in favor of one with fractions.
