STATS!!!

When I tell most people that I am a math teacher I get one of either the following responses; "oh I love my ___ math teacher" or "OH, I hated math when I was in school, I was never very good at it!" The later is usually more frequent. I has been a while since I took a statistics class, 2001 to be exact. Bob Wardrop was the professor who taught from his own text book. The class was made up mostly of students who were going to apply to the business school so he was responsible for making statistics accessible to a variety of levels. Needless to say, it was not as mathematically rigorous as my other courses.

Stats is such a great area of mathematics. It is accessible to most people and gives those who work with it a power to be analytical. It will give you a way to find the lies in the truth that someone presents to them through statistics. I hope that will start to be more critical when presented with statistics.

Class this week was a little overwhelming. So many terms! 4 hours of class time means that we can be introduce to 4x's as many terms as we present our students during a class period. While I teach some aspects of statistics in my various courses, we often to not use the terminology to the extent that we did in class. This makes me a little anxious to have to remember and keep straight all of the terminology and which words correspond with which way to categorize statistics. We shall see what the first quiz is like.... hopefully I'll do okay.

Let it begin...

The research is officially going to begin.  At the end of this class I have many feelings; excitement, anticipation, and already a sense of accomplishment.  When we began this class I felt a little overwhelmed but knew that the way it was structured I would be able to work through it in stages.  At the end, turning in such a large packet has given me the sense of accomplishment.  I am anxious to hear back from our AD council as well as the IRB committee.  I am crossing my fingers that everything is okay.  I will be interested to see how the students in my Algebra 1 classes will work with the computer-based practice.  I will also be interested to see how the dialogue within the class will be changed by the introduction of computer to the classroom as well as the change in venue.  I guess by the end of October we will know.