I am the rare university student of any age who can say that he enjoyed his 9 am class on Friday mornings. Helping students engage sociology and statistics and seeing them struggle and ultimately succeed was a joy, even if it can be a struggle to wake up on a Friday morning. My hope was to convey at least part of that joy to the students, even on Friday, even for math-phobes in a required statistics class.

There are some teaching clichés that I believe are important and true. A good teacher meets his/her students where they are, it is better for students to do rather than to listen, students have a variety of learning styles, and every student deserves my attention and can learn the material. I also know that students need to see the value of a recitation and be treated as reasonable and responsible adults who deserve to see value in their assignments and recitation exercises. Each of my assignments and recitations reflected those values by clearly specifying learning goals, offering students freedom to explore the data instead of emphasizing number crunching, and also offering them support and guidelines.

Going into my teaching assistant position for Sociology 120, I remembered one key fact for that specific class: statistics are very strange. Looking back to my long nights as a college first-year in an introduction to statistics class, I wanted to make sure students had the appropriate support—an engaging and accessible teacher who remained human even while describing the central limit theorem and the intricacies of SPSS (a statistics software platform the class was learning). In addition, I strive to make statistics seem not only approachable, but to demystify the subject and get students to challenge and criticize flawed statistical presentations and the ethical dilemmas hidden behind statistics. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics; my goal is for the students to question and respect the ambiguities of statistics.

As often as I can, I relate statistics to their own environment at Penn. Why run t-tests on hours per week spent working—a topic important to sociology, but perhaps not so interesting to a college first-year—when our data set includes questions on legalizing marijuana, numbers of sex partners, and internet usage? Statistics are clearer when about one’s own experiences or culturally meaningful stories, so assignments focus on whether or not the wealthier men really did get all the girls, for example. In class, I present online clips of statistics rap parodies of Nelly videos (thanks to some other statistics TAs in Oregon) and proved who was the best free throw shooter in the class, and whether or not they were as good as an NBA all-star.

Too often, statistics classes privilege finding significant results and pretty graphs in their lesson plans and examples. Instead, I want students to engage with the interesting research question, even if those questions lead to contradictory answers with confusing results and ugly graphs. Those moments offer a chance to really see statistics in action, to see that statistics are not as clear-cut and definitive as they may seem. I hope that students left the class confused in a way—if even numbers can be unclear or vague, what cannot be questioned or doubted? And how best to respond to those doubts?

I am not too far away from my own college years (even if some of my students thought I was) to present myself as an infallible and all-knowing social statistician. Nor would I ever want to do so. As a teacher, when I make a mistake, I see that as a teachable moment to empower students to grapple with statistics and authority. Further, and more importantly, I strive to be available to all students. Especially while learning statistics and statistics software, students—even the most technologically savvy—can get very frustrated. I believe the time I spend with students outside of the class working through SPSS’s confusing protocols or interpreting data with them is critical to student confidence with concepts and skills they thought they could not perfect. Individual and small group discussions were also the time to expand on aspects of statistics that those particular students might find interesting. For me, it was those moments with my father that made me unafraid of challenging math problems, when a discussion of calculus led to a physics demonstration. For my students, I believe that when they ask for help with a regression and we also talk about educational inequality, its causes, and how statistics can be used to defend different theories about inequality, it can only help excite and engage them.

Students know when a teacher is tired and especially when a teacher is bored. I can say that students may notice me being tired, but never bored. I enjoy working with my students inside and outside of the scheduled class and look forward to my Friday mornings in the computer lab next semester!