There’s no good reason to think of statisticians as boring, strait-laced, number-crunching nerds. But for the digitally impaired–and most others, for that matter–the discipline itself holds about as much interest as counting sheep.
Members of the American Statistical Association admit that changing the image of its numbers-weary brethren is a hard sell. As a start, the group targeted its first-ever Public Statistics Day on Friday to perhaps the toughest audience of all–160 fidgety, summer school pupils from the Chicago Public Schools.
The Washington, D.C.-based association has encouraged community involvement among members with its “Adopt-a-School” program, but the group has never used the eve of an annual convention to reach out to inner-city kids. Chicago, association officials acknowledged, was a tough place to start.
“This is our first time doing this type of outreach,” said Cathy Crocker, the group’s director of education. “So it’s a big risk.”
The idea behind Public Statistics Day is to make statistics and math more accessible to children, get them thinking about careers in statistics and dismantle stereotypes about statisticians, Crocker said.
“The stereotype of a statistician is that they’re male, that they wear pocket protectors and that they’re very formal, logical thinkers,” she said. “But we really want the kids to see for themselves what’s out there.”
What those kids saw may have exceeded even the worst stereotypes they had of statistics and its professionals.
Despite wearing T-shirts that proclaimed, “I am Statistically Significant,” the speakers at the morning sessions at the Chicago Hyatt Regency delivered a message that seemed to go over the heads of many of the 3rd through 12th graders. Volunteers learned the hard way that it is one thing to say that statistics is fun–a recurring theme during the sessions–but proving it is much, much harder.
Volunteers from the general membership held sessions with jazzed-up names, such as “Sex, Drugs and Statistics,” and seemingly interesting topics, such as “Statistics in Sports.” But the names failed to live up to the hype, leaving students with more abstract ideas about the way their morning was spent.
“I can’t even believe how boring this is,” said a 17-year-old senior from Roosevelt High School, who asked that his name not be used. And this assessment came as he was sitting in the provocatively titled “Sex, Drugs and Statistics” session.
The teens appeared to be disappointed with the session for obvious reasons. For starters, there was no sex. The only talk of drugs came when speaker Dan Holder detailed the duties of his job in pharmaceuticals at Merck Research Laboratories outside Philadelphia. And the statistics part, well. . . .
“What a rip-off,” the boy muttered.
The class let Holder know it too. Outbursts frequently interrupted his lecture, and when he opened the floor for questions, a student queried, “Why are you so goofy?”
Holder ignored all the stray comments and muddled through the rest of the discussion, complete with visual aids on an overhead projector. Afterward, he tried to soften the blow.
“Well, they weren’t too bad. I taught high school for a year,” Holder said. “I guess the behavior didn’t surprise me as much as it brought back old memories.”
Holder wasn’t the only volunteer whose lecture provoked sprinklings of off-color outbursts. And Naitee Ting, of Pfizer Inc., had to contend with an uncontrollable gaggle of giggling girls.
One of them, 17-year-old Lisa Robertson, a senior at Roosevelt, said she actually found Ting’s session on health careers in math and stats to be useful.
“A lot of what he was talking about I already knew,” she said. “But I am very interested in math and what he had to say. We just couldn’t stop laughing.”
June Stone-Chestnut, of Wyeth-Ayerst Pharmaceutical Co., had a little more luck during her lecture on statistics as it relates to music, sports and cars by referring to the Chicago Bulls and occasionally slipping into teen vernacular.
In explaining the statistical notion of validating an assumption and planning mathematically for the fact that the numbers might be wrong, she offered: “If I say Scottie Pippen will make 80 percent of his field goals during the season, I want to have a great deal of confidence in this statement. There has to be a reason for me to say it.”
The boys snickered at the example, perhaps knowing that Pippen’s field-goal percentage is nowhere close to 80 percent.
When students asked her why she kept using Scottie Pippen as an example, Stone-Chestnut said, “I guess I should be talking about Michael Jordan, but what is there to talk about? There’s no error there.”
The 3rd graders from Robert Healy Elementary School on the South Side had fun counting M&Ms, sorting them out by color and tallying up the distribution. Brown emerged as the prevalent color, confirming what most who eat the candy have always known.
“And the best part is, when they’re done, they get to eat the data,” said lecturer Lee Abramson, who works for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in Washington.
Bob Comm, a math teacher at Roosevelt, said the idea of making statistics accessible to children was noble, but needed fine-tuning.
“You have to know how to get these kids interested,” he said. “You can’t just stand up there with an overhead projector and talk like a college teacher for 40 minutes. They’re not going to get anything out of that.”
