In light of my last post about math, I wanted to elaborate on my statistics class. Hopefully I have done so already. I did a quick search and found this.
I changed majors so I did not have to retake this Ethics and Values class. It was a philosophy class. It had, in my opinion, little to do with ethics or values.
Anyway, I change majors to a more business orientated major just so I did not have to retake the class. I hated it that much; I was willing to let it hurt my GPA. At the time of the switch however, my major was still very similar to the normal Computer Science track.
I was hoping to take a business statistics class. I had heard it was fairly easy. The teacher, who reminded somewhat of my professor at the U, wanted to teach the class like a math class.
I was disappointed because I wanted to learn how I could use statistics, not crunch a lot of numbers. I disregarded the council to get a stats calculator. I had Calculus, how hard could it be.
It wasn’t hard, just time consuming doing the same small calculations over and over again. Since the summer course was already at a fast pace, I quickly fell behind.
I purposefully signed up the next semester for a different instructor. I found out my little brother had a programmable stats calculator. The class was taught in the Institute building! When I tried to ask why, I was told it was just a building.
I thought to call the ACLU or someone just for the heck of it, but then I figured I might need some help in the class… so just being there might be inspiring.
On the first day, the teacher from the summer walked in. At first I was going to try to transfer classes. But since I knew how he taught, I would use it to my advantage.
I spent time developing neat little programs that were flexible enough to handle a different array of problems. He matched a lot of test questions after the homework problems. The programs would even output little messages I would jot down to “show my work”.
After the first few aced tests, the teacher started to think I was not the stupid kid from the summer. He even tried to befriend me. When I had asked him to bump my summer grade up ever so slightly just so I didn’t have to retake the class – it was a high school trick that I detested but I had seen others at the glorified high school, UVSC, do it…
Anyway, he didn’t bump up my grade. I resented him for it. I was not a college and I hated math!
I think he started to figure out what I was doing because he started to ask reasoning questions on the test. It wasn’t just number crunching. It was interpreting those numbers. Needles to say, “Beats the heck out of me.” was not the correct answer.
Out of his two stats classes that semester, I believe I had the second highest grade. And what did I learn? Beats the heck out of me!
Posted by Michael at December 4, 2004 01:51 PM