Course Philosophy¶
This course is designed to be a first course in Statistics for students with no prior experience in or with statistics. This course seeks to begin your training in statistics. Success in this course will be measured iteratively, placing emphasis on the student’s ownership of the learning process and a student’s consistency of effort.
Stretch Zone¶
Borrowing language from the 2019 Google J-term course, when learning in a classroom setting, at any moment, we exist in one of three zones: safe, stretch, or strain. A student in the safe zone is completely comfortable, and the course material is completely within what the student already knows. The strain zone is the complete opposite of the safe zone. A student in the strain zone feels completely overwhelmed with the material to the point where they can’t find any meaningful connections between the current material and what the student already knows.
The material in this course is intellectually challenging. Several of the topics are ones that took me a long time to fully understand their subtleties. The goal for this course is to spend the vast majority of our time in the stretch zone. In this zone, the material is just beyond our current knowledge base and while we are a bit uncomfortable with the material, we can see possible paths to tie the new material into our existing knowledge. In other words, in this class, our brains should be stretching, but not straining.
At the end of each week, if you have not been surprised or challenged, or if you have no questions about the material, this could mean that you are in the safe or strain zones. If you find yourself exasperated or negative about the class, you may be in the strain zone. If you find yourself using words like “boring” or “easy”, you are likely in the safe zone. If you are in either zone, please get in touch with me: in class, on slack, in an appointment, or send me an email. I want you to get the most out of this course, but I cannot make adjustments to the course if I do not have firsthand knowledge of what is going on.