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...
Reading a statistical table is like reading those BAL tables your Uni passes out during Orientation Week.
Alright. Stick with me. I had this idea when I was scrunching my hair this morning in a hotel in Long Island while on Spring Break. I'm sure this is also the situation that inspired Salk to create the polio vaccine. So, stats tables. These are tricky to teach because we don't use them, right? Not as mid-level statisticians. The software computes a test statistic, looks up that statistic on the appropriate table, and then reports a p -value. But, simultaneously, the students need to understand what is going on "under the hood." This is a thing that always catches me up in class. Given how we do statistics nowadays, I spend all this freaking time explaining something of very little real-world value. Sorry, Fisher! Sometimes it feels like I'm trying to teach them how to decode something. But I may have thought of an easier way to explain it. While scrunching. ANYWAY. I was scrunching my hair, and I thought, "Oh, test statistics tables ( F , t , X2) are like...