The Average Person Spends 24 Years of Their Life Asleep

No objections to the grammatical error in the title, please! It's a quotation from "The Joy of Stats", a 1-hour BBC Four program narrated by the Swedish public health expert and statistician Hans Rosling. I had first heard of him when a friend sent me a link to the short video, "200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes", which turns out to be an excerpt from "The Joy of Stats". If you want to take four minutes of your life to feel much much better about the future of the planet, stop and watch that video now.

While watching this video, it struck me that it would be a great way to address one of my New Year's resolutions for teaching: TEACH MORE STATISTICS.

I teach math to students who don't love math and maybe never will despite my best efforts. Some of them may go on to take calculus in high school or college, or they may study engineering, economics, medicine or some other field that demands high mathematical abilities. But my guess is that some of them will be artists, some will be business owners, some lawyers, some journalists (if that's still a profession in their time), etc. Those professions just don't require a high degree of specialized algebra or calculus knowledge. Yes, it's great for them to develop problem-solving abilities through algebra, geometry and calculus. But honestly, what they need to is to learn stats. That's where we see math everyday.

Here's a challenge for you. Pick up a newspaper and find a random article. Now try to read to the second column of the article without reading a statistic. Good luck. Stats matter. We are constantly confronted with them so that we will be persuaded to believe the arguments and stories put before us. Stats have all the credibility. Especially in today's world of overwhelming amounts of data.

So, my goal is to teach more statistics and maybe even to have students connect statistics (and hence math!) to the things they already care about. Baseball. Basketball. Blockbuster movies. Cell phones. Shopping. Whatever.

Here's where I need some help. What should students learn to do with statistics? We teach them about mean, median, mode, etc. But what about teaching them how to collect data? And deal with organizing messy data from multiple sources that come in at different times?

Do you use statistics in your life? What do you do?