First week of work about to end

It's been a busy week here. Meetings, meeting, meetings... I didn't have time to prepare any syllabi until yesterday afternoon, nor to prepare any lectures until today. (Classes start Tuesday.) There's a lot to criticize about the "new faculty orientation", but I won't do that here; besides, my division chair solicited our input.

It's a lot of fun to sit back and watch the professors vent about problems at the college. Everyone's good at identifying problems, but no one really knows how to fix them. Issues like retention, poor preparation, and motivation were the big issues at my undergraduate college, and this one, also small and private, is no different.

For my part, I'm teaching four classes, the usual load at a teaching school:

• Intermediate Algebra (a course for students unprepared for high school),
• Statistics (two sections, this being our department's most important "service" course for the college),
• Linear Algebra (a "majors" course).

I'm worried about statistics, since I've never taught it before. I spent today preparing a lecture, and I don't think it's very good. However, I have no way of knowing how to make it better! I would like to my teaching style to be problem-oriented, rather than answer-oriented. What do I mean? I mean that I would like the class to consist of a few easily-identifiable problems about which students would care. (Or, even if they don't care, they could see why someone else would.) We (as a class) would spend the semester trying to solve those problems. This would be more engaging than the lecture approach, which begins with the method of solution, and the professor gives as many examples as time allows, perhaps asks the students some intelligent questions, etc.

The trouble with this ideal is identifying the few problems. I'm not that experienced a researcher, and in my opinion, textbooks neither do a good job of identifying these few important problems. Or, if they do, they don't organize their texts around them.

In any case, I can identify the problems in intermediate algebra and linear algebra much more easily than the problems in statistics, because I use them a lot. But statistics? what mathematician needs statistics? ;-) I hate statistics, and have since I first took it fifteen years ago.

To begin with, statistics was the first course in college where I had to use a calculator. There were simply too many numbers being thrown at us, and while I was excellent with hand arithmetic, I wasn't good enough to keep up with all that.

Actually, statistics was the only course in college where I had to use a calculator. That may speak ill of my undergraduate university, but that's one of the reasons I hate it.

Another reason I hate statistics, is that it's usually a very fact-based course. As far as I can tell, there's no attempt to make students reason mathematically in an introductory statistics course. So far, it's like this: here are the definitions; here are the formulas; now use them to calculate some statistics, and to say why our examples are good (or bad) uses of statistics. Yuck.

This wouldn't be so bad if statisticians actually had their facts straight. While reviewing textbooks for the course, however, I looked at three texts, each of which had its own definition of standard deviation, each of which was somewhat incompatible with the other text's definition. This does not go far towards improving my opinion of the field.

That's not math; it's statistics. Don't ask me about it, because I don't understand it, and based on my limited experience with statistics, I'm not sure the statisticians do either.

Hopefully, the rest of the semester will prove me wrong. Right now though I'd rather teach three sections of intermediate algebra than have these two sections of statistics.