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. Did you know that the Society for the Teaching of Psychology maintains Project Syllabus ? This is a list of juried syllabi for every psychology class imaginable. I went through the process of submitting my undergraduate Positive Psychology syllabus . In addition to performing a bit of national service, I also had the chance to improve my syllabi via peer review guided by the Project Syllabus rubric . In particular, I appreciated the suggestion to clearly spell out WHY I use the assessments that I use. I already had included my employer-compulsory linkages between learning outcomes and course assessment, but I added information, in plain English, regarding what I hope my students learn from the different assignments in the course. Project Syllabus includes hundreds of these juried syllabi. This list includes 12 different statistics classes as well as over 20 research methods classes. I highly recommend submitting your own syllabi for a great class that you teach, or using this...