The thing about my way of teaching stats is that my cool, novel examples get old really fast. Like, pop culture is on a thirty-day cycle. Anyway, YEARS ago, 2014 to be exact, I blogged about illustrating bimodal data distributions using baby name data from the Social Security Administration. Specifically, when an older name comes back into vogue, it has a bimodal distribution when you plot time on the X axis. I stand by this example. However, all of the data illustrations come from 2014. When our traditionally aged college students were 6 or 7. Which makes this example feel a little stale. However, here is some data, courtesy of Redditor fevaah , showing old names that are back in vogue through 2025 ! And Eleanor, Violet, Nora, and Hazel are here, illustrating bimodal distributions for a new generation. If you used my old baby-name data, this is a quick, easy refresh for your lectures (or a fun new addition if you didn't). If this idea was help...
1) Not every example needs to be big and fancy. 2) Sometimes you just need to refresh a lecture. By "refresh", I mean both new-to-you examples and examples that are, objectively, new. That is why I'm adding this example from the New York Times to my Fall 2026 classes. It was published in the summer of 2026, based on 2025 data that explores both the overall popularity of emojis AND generational differences in emoji usage. How to use in class: 1) A lesson in repurposing existing data sets: 2) Ordinal/rank order data: Here are the top ten emojis for 2025, as well as their change in rank. The rise of the "loudly crying face" is concerning! If a top ten list exists...then certainly a bottom 10 list exists. See: Please see below for emojis 490-500. Poor bread. You can also discuss rank data with this list of fastest rising emojis. Or you can use this example of emojis that are increasing in popularity, with a dash of relative percentages: 3) They also looked at emo...