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...
I love internet-based teaching ideas. They are free and current. At least they were current when I first posted them, but some of my posts are ten years old. Such is the case for my old post about the Baby Name Voyage r and how to use it to illustrate unimodal, and bimodal distributions. Instead, please go to NameGrapher to show your students how flash-in-the-plan trendy baby names, like my own, have an unimodal distribution: As opposed to bimodal distributions, which flag a name as a more classical name that enjoyed a resurgence, like Emma: When I use this in class, I frame it between names that were trendy once and names that were trendy one hundred years ago and are again trendy. As a mom to grade-school-aged kids, I have certainly noticed this as a trend in kid names. So many Lilies and Noras! I also make sure my students understand that this information is gathered via Social Security Administration applications from the federal government, to back up another clai...