First Day of Stats

I finally had a dream last night about showing up to class unprepared. I know, it's kind of strange to do it after the first day of class, but it was still before the first day of stats, which was today. And the dream was about showing up to stats unprepared, so it's appropriate.

I did not actually show up to stats unprepared. The first day went pretty well. They seemed to have fun with the "Questions on Backs" exercise (see this post), and, as usual, we got some interesting data to work with. One question was, "What is the fastest you've ever driven?" The top reported speed was 195. Another was, "Was [our college] your first choice of colleges? There were some yesses, some nos, one "Here" and one "1". No one came forward to defend the weird answers, so we just had to speculate. My favorite questions was, "How old do you think the professor is?" One student answered "20". There's an A for class participation for the day!

The classes seemed pretty game. Neither class had a lot of questions, yet, so I'll have to try to draw them out. I like to make cards with the students' names on them and draw a card to decide who to call on. That keeps me from always calling the same people, and it seems fair to the students, because they all have an equal chance of being called on.

Tomorrow: day 2 of Linear Algebra and Modern Algebra.