Yesterday’s modest tally of eight baskets after 26 minutes was nothing if not a baseline.
We’re used to baselines in education: in order to know how much we’ve progressed we need to know where we’ve started from and a data baseline (whether this be of fronted adverbials, adjective declensions or educational attainment in general) is pretty much as good a starting point as any.
So, OK, eight baskets after 26 minutes may not count for much, but it does at least give you a baseline figure of 0.30769231 baskets per minute. (Doncha just love figures to eight decimal places? They remind me of population statistics that state things like ‘2.4 people live In a normal household’. Ever seen 0.4 of a person? No, me neither unless you count those people lying comatose in the streets after a Covid-lockdown-release pub crawl.)
But I digress. 0.30769231 baskets per minute (or BPM – note the immediate adoption of an acronym when it comes to measuring success) may or may or may not be a measure of success, but it is certainly a baseline. And something to build on, as football managers are wont to say after the 15-0 thrashing of their side by their league’s minnows. ‘We may have just been humiliated, Brian, by a team which is holding up the whole of the English football league, but our attacking spirit gave me hope and is something to build on.”
So today, I was determined to build on that baseline of Day One and achieve success. However, what often happens when you start to measure success, you find yourself with an overwhelming desire to measure all sorts of other things which you hope will indicate whether or not you are actually achieving anything, in what context you’re achieving it, whether you’re getting any better, or whether the whole endeavour is a complete waste of yours and everybody else’s time.
Today was a case in point. Not content enough just to measure BPM (Baskets per minute, do please keep up at the back), it struck me that it would be really useful not just to measure balls that followed a trajectory of hand air basket swoosh bounce and a triumphant yeh, but to measure how much effort this took.
I arbitrarily decided that Yvonne, my independent invigilator, also now needed to start counting how many attempts I had made at causing that trajectory. My feeling was that effort could be determined by calculating the ratio of the number of balls thrown to the number of successful baskets. Logically, if every effort succeeded in achieving a basket, then my effort would be 100%. Note how one’s feelings could soon be legitimised by expressing an event in logical terms. This gives one a curious sense of intellectual satisfaction, even if no-one else has been involved in the calculus.
So, count the number of attempts as well as the number of successes she did. After 24 attempts I had scored precisely nul point meaning my effort was precisely zero. However, on the 25th attempt I actually shot one basket meaning that my effort had increased dramatically to 0.04 exactly. An infinite improvement on the situation I had found myself in just seconds before. This was a very satisfying moment and gave me (if not Yvonne) confidence that we were moving in the right direction. Something else to build on if you like.
Before I knew it (well, actually after 26 minutes in fact) we stopped the challenge and counted up the ‘scores on the doors’ as Brucie like to chuckle in The Generation Game.
15 hoops over 194 attempts over 26 minutes.
0.57692308 BPM. Up from 0.30769231 BPM from the day before. An increase of a massive 87.500000%.
An effort score of 0.07731959 BPA. Good? Bad? Indifferent? It is at least another baseline and something I look forward to building on over the remaining 24 days of the challenge.
And BPA? Baskets per Attempts of course. Where would we be without our acronyms? Struggling to determine whether we were making any progress at all, that’s for sure.
You can find out why I’m involved in the 2.6 Challenge – and how you can help – here.
Thanks to the Sunday Night Quiz Gang for the graphic!
Dr Nick Owen MBE PLUS 