ASHA-es to ASHA-es (this is the dumbest blog title ever)
I miss teaching that ASHA course.
True, it’s nice not having to frantically prep 100% brand new lecture material for every Tuesdsay/Thursday, but it was such a cool chance to teach something other than math/stats (while still throwing some math/stats in there) that I miss having that…diversity in my teaching schedule.
Maybe one of these years I can teach it again. Or teach one of the one-semester courses.
Who knows??
Graphin’ It
I think my favorite topic we covered in ASHA this past winter semester was the “good visualizations, bad visualizations” topic, in which I showed the students some examples of some really good visualizations of data/information as well as some really bad ones.
Visualization of information is, in my opinion, overlooked in introductory (and advanced) statistics courses. It’s important to not only understand the analyses and the data behind the analyses, but it’s just as important to be able to convey the meanings and interpretations of the data in ways that make said meanings/interpretations easy to understand. This can be done very effectively and efficiently with a good visualization.
And it can be done very misleadingly with a poor visualization.
I think I’m going to incorporate a little unit (maybe a lab or two?) focusing on the importance of good visualization next time I teach a higher-level stats course. Even if I just give similar examples to the ones I gave in ASHA (as well as, of course, general guidelines for different types of common visualizations), I can at least get students thinking about the visual presentation of information and how important it can be.
Anyway.
An Eventful Day
Today involved:
- A migraine upon waking up (always fun!!!!)
- A TON of smoke in the air and, along with it, a very smoky run this morning. I tried wearing a mask for part of it but running in a mask is freaking hard, yo
- The first day of classes which, for me, just involved ASHA (or standing around while Rob introduced ASHA, as I’m teaching next semester and he’s taking charge of this semester)
- An at-home vet check-up for Pepper (just because taking her to the vet seemed to really stress her out)
I hope this isn’t indicative of how the rest of the semester will go.
Edit from mid-October: HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Opportunity!
So back around the middle of last semester, I met with Dr. Ware in sort of the annual “all tenure track employees should meet with their Department Head to make sure they’re making reasonable progress” sort of meeting. At that meeting, he mentioned that he’d been approached by the people running the Art and Science Honors Academy (ASHA) about having someone from the Math/Stats department get involved in the program. ASHA is, according to Dr. Ware, designed for undergraduate students who show an interest in both the arts and the sciences. All of the courses offered in the program involve some mix of information from the arts side and the science side.
Of course, this sounded absolutely fascinating and I intimated that I’d love to teach something like that.
Well, I got contacted today by the ASHA people and they said they’d like for me to teach their intro class if I still wanted to. The intro class, unlike the higher level classes, is a full-year course that is often co-taught, preferably with one instructor coming from the Faculty of Arts and the other coming from the Faculty of Science. They also said they’d never had anyone from the Math/Stats Department involved in this before.
So I readily agreed! There are no further details other than that right now – I don’t know who I’ll be teaching with or what exactly we’ll be teaching – but I’m super excited for this chance. Based on what I’ve read about this program, it sounds like something I would have absolutely LOVED as an undergraduate.
Woo!
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