Turns out that the senior research methodologist in the SSRC has taught classes in statistics and methods, prior to my arrival, so the teaching coordinator asked if I would be interested. While I have never taught a statistics class, I have taught methods. And I have had some pretty damn good training in the art of teaching. And also, I have won two teaching awards. So it's not really like this:
Of course, I am not sure how much of this the coordinator knew when she asked me to teach an undergraduate statistics course. It's probably a bit uncommon, for someone who is a good teacher to not move automatically and fully into the teaching track. If I wasn't in Chicago at DePaul, I would probably be at a teaching college, with my four courses a semester and no research activity.
The conversation I had with the coordinator was a great conversation and she said that she would send me the course list so that I might consider teaching some of the "fun" classes in demography and health. Yeah. How much fun will that be?
This development is actually quite fortuidous...Dave and I watched a thing on Sunday Morning a couple of weeks ago about the Khan Academy that has made me rethink how I would revamp my teaching style, if it ever came to that.
That said, I believe that I will make every effort to incorporate memes in this class, as well as pop culture references to Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and Keeping up with the Kardashians. For example, here is a question that I might ask on a midterm:
"Following the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, a CDC researcher is interested in how many people are infected ("turned") each day. She has been collecting this data for a year, but decides to draw a random sample of 30, for which she obtained a sample mean of 34.1 infections per day, with a sample standard deviation of 0.4."
Question 1: Calculate the standard error of the mean.
Question 2: Construct a 95% confidence interval to estimate the mean number of infections.
Question 3: Write a narrative explanation of this confidence interval.
And so on... couldn't it be very fun??
I think so.
In addition to that new opportunity... I was chatting with one of the other girls at CrossFit this afternoon and she mentioned that she (and another girl in our class) do Roller Derby. Apparently this particular establishment is pretty good. And they invited me to come to their tryouts!! Can you believe it? My mother's dream come true! When I pointed out that I don't "skate" they replied this as not as big of a problem as you would think. Apparently, being an athlete is a solid enough foundation... then after that, it's just learning how to skate. Normally, I would be all over this. But I decided to show some restraint and not jump with both feet. But it was cool that they invited me. And in case you were wondering, yes, I have thought about what my name would be.
Guns McGee.
Of course this only works if you have actual guns (i.e. well-developed biceps). Otherwise, its just sad. So we will revisit this issue in the nearish future.
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