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Advice to a Colleague on Teaching Statistics Bonnie filterborn
Recently, a former colleague who had only a few students sign up for his statistics section confided that when he first came to the college he was the star statistics teacher, the one whom all the students wanted to have. Now, that was no longer true. He said to me: "NOW they want you," He said it quickly, seeming not to want an answer. If I had had the courage, I would have told him the evolutionary process that I went through in order to get to a point where I felt good about teaching elementary statistics to nonmajors and where I wanted to learn more about a subject that many mathematicians consider a bothersome stepchild.
Mathematicians used to describe themselves as either pure or applied. We pure mathematicians were unsullied by the real world and felt superior to those who dirtied their minds with applications. The distinction was typically made by graduate students and some professors in the better research institutions. When we left the protection of those rarefied environments to teach in other institutions, we came face to face with students who feared mathematics and who had a great intolerance for haughty theorists.