Update: Jan. 29
How can you make this week’s Super Bowl relevant to your curriculum? Whether debating football-related controversies, making predictions, analyzing ads, writing descriptions, understanding data and statistics or learning about head trauma, we have ideas for using The Times and the Learning Network to do it.
How do you teach the Super Bowl? Let us know.
History, Social Studies and Civics
NFL Photos, via Associated PressSuper Bowl I at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1967 did not sell out, in part because tickets cost $12 instead of the usual $6. Related ArticleDiscover Super Bowl History: Read the original Times article about the first Super Bowl in 1967. Compare it to an article reporting on a recent Super Bowl, then create an infographic — perhaps a Venn diagram or a timeline — or a video showing how the event has changed over time.
You might use the video embedded at the top of this post, “Super Bowl XLVIII, by the Numbers,” as one model for how to put statistics, facts and images together engagingly.
Debate Issues Related to the Game: For instance, Is it immoral to watch the Super Bowl?
Steve Almond poses this question in a recent piece for the Magazine. As he explains:
Recently…medical research has confirmed that football can cause catastrophic brain injury — not as a rare and unintended consequence, but as a routine byproduct of how the game is played. That puts us fans in a morally queasy position. We not only tolerate this brutality. We sponsor it, just by watching at home. We’re the reason the N.F.L. will earn $5 billion in television revenue alone next year, three times as much as its runner-up, Major League Baseball.
What do you think? Has our “worship of the game has blinded us to its pathologies”? What responsibilities do we have as viewers?
Have your students debate this question, or other football-related questions we’ve asked as part of our Student Opinion feature. After they take a stand, invite them to post comments to our blog:
- What Is Your Reaction to Richard Sherman’s Postgame Interview?
- Should Parents Let Their Children Play Football?
- If Football Is So Dangerous to Players, Should We Be Watching It?
- Should College Football Players Get Paid?
- When Do Pranks Cross the Line to Become Bullying?
- Is It Offensive for Sports Teams to Use Native American Names and M...
- Where Should Colleges and Sports Teams Draw the Line in Selling Nam...
Make Predictions: Which team will win Super Bowl XLVIII? By how much? Use this online ballot to make predictions about everything from who will be the most valuable player to game-time temperature to how many hats Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers will wear during the halftime show.
Learn About Leadership: Use sports to help students think about leadership with our Super Bowl lesson plan from 2001, in which students answered questions like “Why do you think the success of a sports team has such an impact on the city it represents?” and “What is ‘morale’ and what do you think leaders can do to ‘boost’ it?
Create Museum Exhibits: Have students reflect on the qualities that make exceptional football players, or athletes of any kind, then design museum exhibits celebrating their achievements, using our lesson plan “The Sporting Life.”
Update | Jan. 29: Debate Marijuana Legalization: “There have been many jokes about how Super Bowl XLVIII will be the ‘stoner bowl’ because the Broncos and the Seahawks are from the two states that have moved to legalize marijuana,” writes James Barron, and the Marijuana Policy Project has spent $5,000 to rent several 60-foot-wide billboards in New Jersey, within easy driving distance of MetLife Stadium. The billboards call marijuana “safer than alcohol…and football.” Invite your students to discuss this message. You might then have them post comments to our Student Opinion questionShould Marijuana Be Legal?
Language Arts, Fine Arts and Media Studies
A Super Bowl ad for Squarespace, a web design company, depicts the Internet as a dystopian landscape. Related ArticleCritique the Ads: The Super Bowl is the biggest day of the year for advertising, especially now that television viewers routinely zip through or zap commercials. How is Super Bowl advertising changing because of technology and social media?
Do your students realize how much they are marketed to in general? Does the blurring of the line between marketing and entertainment concern them? Do they know how to spot native advertising? Use our lesson plan, “On the Market: Thinking Critically About Advertising,” to help explore these questions. Or, try our lesson plan on Super Bowl ads to have students analyze and critique the spots that will air on Feb. 2 specifically. They might also answer our Student Opinion question, What Makes a Good Commercial?
Update: Jan. 29: Cheerios cereal, which introduced in May a commercial featuring an interracial family that unexpectedly generated an outpouring of vituperative online remarks is returning with a Super Bowl ad about diversity. As we asked students in a Student Opinion question last June, Why Did a Cheerios Ad Attract So Many Angry Comments Online? What do you think about Cheerios bringing this family back for a second ad?
Imagine Powerful P.S.A.s: In 2010, Florida quarterback Tim Tebow made a controversial advertisement for a conservative Christian group that aired during the Super Bowl, and there was much discussion about whether it should run. In 2012 the N.F.L. was the target of more than a dozen lawsuits accusing it of deliberately concealing information about the effects on players of repeated hits to the head, and ran its own ad to address player safety. In 2013 players shared a public service message about A.L.S., commonly known as Lou...
Ask students what they think about these kinds of issue-based ads and public service announcements. What commercial would they like to see during the Super Bowl this year, given the enormous audience that message would reach?
Play a Student Crossword: Try our Football crossword to see what you know about the game and its players.
Flex Those Descriptive Writing Muscles: “The _________ won the game against the_________.” How do sports reporters reinvent that simple sentence in interesting ways every day?
Use sports writing as a model for descriptive writing with our lesson “Getting in the Game,” then challenge your students to write a lively paragraph (or more!) that reports on some aspect of this year’s Super Bowl.
Map Social Media: Use the 2009 Interactive Map: Twitter Chatter During the Super Bowl to see a United States map that shows the frequency of the words that were tweeted as the Steelers played the Cardinals that year. But 2009 was an eon ago in social-media years. What do you think a map of this year’s contest will look like? Why?
Will you be watching the Super Bowl on a “second screen” this year? How do you think doing so will affect how you react to what you see? Use a tool likeStorify to collect and display some of the best reactions to the game, and information you find about the ads, the halftime show or any other aspect of the Super Bowl.
Create Logo Art: Try our design lesson, based on a slideshow of artist-created “alternative logos”, about how Super Bowl art has evolved over time.
Science
Andrew Burton/Getty ImagesSuper Bowl XLVIII ads in Times Square. Meteorologists say the New York area will probably endure freezing temperatures nearly every day through game day. Related ArticleWorry About the Weather: In this article, about the outsized role meteorology will play in the game this year, we learn:
It is the first time the Super Bowl has been held outdoors in a cold-weather environment, and it comes during what has already been a cruel winter, first with the “polar vortex” plunging the city and much of the country into a deep freeze, and then a storm that dropped a foot of snow in New York, and then yet another blast of arctic air.
While long-range forecasts are unreliable, most forecasters agree that it should be the coldest Super Bowl ever, well below the 39-degree mark set in New Orleans in 1972.
How is ever-increasing computing sophistication leading to more accurate forecasts? Why does it matter so much for the Super Bowl? In what other industries is it also important to precisely predict the weather? Have students learn about the field of meteorology and how it is changing, or invite them to think about other cold-weather science questions, like how playing in the bitter cold affects athletes. (And if those aren’t enough resources, we have many more ideas for teaching about the science of cold weather.)
Learn About Football and Head Trauma: Increasingly, head injuries in sports are in the news. With all the research, is football reaching a “turning point”?
We have a lesson plan on brain trauma, but you might also invite students to answer our Student Opinion questions, “Is Tackle Football Too Dangerous For Kids to Play?”. Or try our lesson on sports risks and school policies to have your students do their own field research.
Pose and Answer Sports-Related Science Questions: Do heart attack rates rise during the Super Bowl? Have your students pose sports-related science and health questions and then work in groups to answer them, using this Science Times “Really?” column as a model.
Learn Football Anatomy: Or try our lesson on the anatomy and physiology of the muscular system, the sk...and have students research joints in the body.
Math
Is the Super Bowl a Good Bet? In this article, Joe Drape writes:
In Nevada, more bets are placed on the Super Bowl than any other sporting event. Last year, for example, a record of nearly $99 million was bet in Nevada’s sports books. Of that, the books kept $7,206,460.
While even the best quarterbacks fumble and the seemingly invincible teams find ways to lose, the sports books nearly always wind up ahead.
Who decides the numbers and proposition bets for big games like the Super Bowl, and how do they do it? Why do the sports books nearly always end up ahead? What is “square money” and why is it that “the flood of square money that inundates the Super Bowl makes the game one of the easiest lines of the year for oddsmakers”? Why, in a world where algorithms rule and quants are celebrated does putting out a number remain “an old-school endeavor”? Have students read this article to answer these questions and consider if, when and how betting on the Super Bowl is worth it.
Use Data and Statistics to Play Fantasy Football: In our lesson plan,“Put Me In, Coach! Getting in the Quantitative Game with Fantasy Fo...students use statistical analyses and quantitative evaluations to get the edge in fantasy football. By looking at data, measuring match-ups and making projections, students put their analytic skills to the test.
Determine Football “Greatness”: Use sports statistics to create graphs via this lesson, in which students explore both the objective and subjective criteria used to determine the “greatness” of a person or team. Students then compare the statistics and argue the need for other criteria to adequately judge whether a person or team is ‘the best’ in their profession.
And if you want to do more with sports and infographics, you might like our recent list Interpreting the Data: 10 Ways to Teach Math and More Using Infogra...
Update | Jan. 29: Use Statistics to Construct Arguments: After we posted this lesson on Twitter, Caroline Doughty, a second grade teacher in Alexandria City, Virginia, contacted us to tell us about how she’s teaching the Super Bowl:
This year, I am integrating Super Bowl statistics into my math and writing blocks. In math, we are comparing numbers (touchdowns, yardage, years of experience) and adding together scores. After analyzing the statistics, students are creating arguments for who they think will win and providing evidence to back up their opinions. Then, students will try to persuade others. Lastly, each student will vote on who they think will win and we will graph the results.
I try to incorporate sports into my instruction as much as I can. Especially in math, it provides real life data to work with and the kids love it.
