Jim Rubillo is currently the Executive Assistant to the President for Planning, Assessment and Research at Bucks County Community College. He also holds the rank of Senior Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science. The mere length of the title should impress you! He has taught at Bucks County Community College for 23 years and before that he taught at the high school level and was a high school mathematics deparrment chair. He is active in mathematics education, has written numerous articles for The Mathematics Teacher and The Arithmetic Teacher. He has also been active in the planning role of several NCTM Philadelphia Regional Meetings and is General Chair for the next NCTM Northeastern Regional Meeting which will be held in Philadelphia in November 1995. He is Past President of the Association of Teachers of Mathematics of Philadelphia and Vicinity and the Bucks County Council of Teachers of Mathematics.
And those are the cold dry statistics. But Jim Rubillo is anything but cold and dry. And to Jim, statistics is anything but a cold dry subject. I asked the magic question and then I sat back and listened as Jim told me his philosophy of statistics, life and education. Read on.
He travels all over the United States making presentations on a variety of subjects and very frequently on statistics. Although he has made about 350 of these presentations he said he was really nervous when he was making a presentation for a breakfast meeting in Seattle. There were 1,200 people there, but that's not what made him nervous. Each plate had half of a tomato on it and he confessed that it made him very nervous to make a presentation to that many people with a tomato within reach! He enjoys working with mathematics teachers but grins and says they sometimes lack the social graces. He says that he has been called and asked to speak and told they are desperate for a speaker. He remembers once being asked if he would speak at a banquet, if they couldn't get someone famous. He has a devoted group of hecklers that rum up at his presentations, and he loves it. It helps him "work the audience." Having heard several of these presentations and probably being guilty of heckling just a little I can relate that I enjoy his presentations almost as much as he does and, to a great extent, BECAUSE he does. He is witty and yet he gives you alot of food for thought. One of his biggest fans (his daughter) asked him in bright-eyed honesty: "Do they really pay you to talk?"
Jim has a lot of humorous PCTM related stories. He has been with PCTM for many years and several classic inside stories seem to involve him. He tells one about the time he shared a room with Fred Stewart and Don Scheuer. Don who is a light sleeper accusses Jim of snoring but, according to Jim, Fred is the champion , a chainsaw snorer. About 3:00 am that night it got so bad it even woke Jim up. He could hear Don thrashing around and finally Don shouted, "Roll over, Fred." Without skipping a beat or waking up Fred muttered, "Do you want me to sit up and bark too?"
He has much to say about statistics, one of his favorite topics. He is currently working with people in industry and showing them how they can use statistics to improve production. These are "general math" type people, he confides. But they are very wise when it comes to using statistics and common sense. He thinks we get hung up on the formulas and cloud the real power and life of the subject. In worrying about averages we tend to make it too abstract. "Don't make it so mean," he quips. We need to have a feel for the experience and look at one head at a time. The distribution is more important than the average. He tells about going into an elementary school and having the students analyze data collected from their classmates. They looked at the number of right footed, or left eyed people. They checked tongue types and lengths of index fingers and drew bar charts and calculated what the average student looked like. And then they looked for the average student. What they found was that there wasn't one. They discussed this and the students began to see the limitations of statistics and that variation is what makes us important and distinguishes us from one another.
Jim points out that we need to shift statistics from a discipline to the world. We talk about connections but we aren't doing it. We must make connections to the students' world. There is alot of fun stuff out there, according to Jim. "Did you talk atout the elections and all those polls in your mathematics class?", he asked me. "Were they good, bad orindifferent? Who did they ask? How many did they have to ask? What was the degree of confidence? Can you really tell anything with a sample or do you have to ask everyone?" He tells those who don't believe in sampling to stick to their guns and the next time they have a blood test tell them to take it all! He points out that we worry about trying to squeeze statistics into a curriculum that is ready so jam-packed with what we feel we must teach. But are we so jam-packed that we miss the important things? He thinks it is time to review what we teach and weed out things that are no longer important. "Why do we factor?", he asks. "Or prove identities? Aren't there better ways to solve problems using technology?" He hears the excuse that we do it because they will need it in college but it's time for the colleges to react to change. They also need to reevaluate. "Do we need to teach all those integration techniques when we have symbolic manipulators that will do the work for us? We certainly don't take the square root by hand anymore and maybe it's time to give up some of the other methodologies we have been holding on to. Let us expand the list of items we no longer teach, like taking the square root."
He likes to ask the question: "What is the difference between statistics and probability?" He has an opinion but feels the discussion is more important than an answer. As the interview continued he referred back to this question and eventually gave me his answer. When you have a bag of marbles and you know that there are 6 red marbles and 8 white marbles you can make a prediction, based on probability, about what color marble you will pull out of the bag. Probability answers questions about a known population. Statistics draws a conclusion based on observations, and the population is unknown. Of course you use probability theory when you do statistics. We should encourage risk taking. Study and experiment and then draw a conclusion. He often asks his audience if they would be willing to bet a dollar that their answer is right. You know they have confidence in their answer if they are willing to put a buck on it.
Jim has received many honors, but none he treasures more than being selected as a distinguished alumnus from West Chester. There have only been about 130 selected since the award has been given and only four or five are mathematicians. He credits Al Filano with much of his success, and says Al was the greatest inspiration in his life. Once,when working exceptionally hard on a project, someone asked him why he did it. His reply was that Al expected it of him. Reason enough. He says Filano was not a teacher but a rabbi demonstrating for them a way of life as well as teaching them mathematics. Filano was president of PCTM in the late 50's and made sure his students got started in the profession as professionals by joining PCTM. Jim's philosophy is that we, as teachers, should deliver the message and not make ourselves the message. Make a difference. Don't feed your ego. He gets great satisfaction from watching kids grow. Sometimes they surprise him and sometimes they prove him wrong. "And that is great!"
After writing this article I called Jim and offered to send him a copy so he could be sure I hadn't misquoted him. "Do I sound insightful and intelligent?", he asked. "Well...ah...mmm...YES!", I replied. "Then you have probably misquoted me." And that is the real Jim Rubillo.
Annalee Henderson, PCTM Historian