Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Day 258

I have a number of new students in my classes right now - by new I mean new to college. They are like infants, desperately trying to survive in a world that is foreign and frightening. Their ignorance astounds me.

Then I remember a statistics class that I took a few years ago. The instructor was Turkish. It took me a few weeks to realize that he was in fact speaking English. Chi-square, probabilities, coefficients, binomial distribution: it was all Greek to me.

Oh, how I suffered in that class. I can remember what it felt like to be ignorant and to have my ignorance transformed. Those are probably much more important lessons than the meaning of a z-score.

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