Modern emoji data to freshen up your Fall 2026 lectures

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:

Emoji use data was collected with Google’s Federated Analytics, capturing anonymous use of the GBoard (the default keyboard on stock Android devices like Google Pixel). The collection periods were November 2024 to January 2025 and November 2025 to January 2026. Percent change is calculated as change in share. Reddit data is from Academic Torrents, which published combined data from Pushshift and Arctic Shift by subreddit. Each subreddit analyzed was for a designated generation or age group, although individual user ages couldn’t be verified. Months with fewer than 150 comments containing emojis have been excluded. We also filtered out “emoji dump” threads, where users are encouraged to post large numbers of emojis.

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 emoji data looking just at age-specific subreddits (detailed in the methodology data above).

This skull data from r/teenagers has a lot of ecological validity for me after texting with my tween niece all summer while she was in the middle of a cross-country move. Also, it may explain the rise in the crying face's popularity described above AND the trend (as it has usurped the skull). This is also a funny one for explaining the basics of visualizing changes over time using a line graph.

ALSO: The kids are hilarious and have enacted a Stoicism emoji that the adults aren't using yet:

Ways to use funny meme scales in your stats classes

Have you ever heard of the theory that there are multiple people worldwide thinking about the same novel thing at the same time? It is the multiple discovery hypothesis of invention . Like, multiple great minds around the world were working on calculus at the same time. Well, I think a bunch of super-duper psychology professors were all thinking about scale memes and pedagogy at the same time. Clearly, this is just as impressive as calculus. Who were some of these great minds? 1) Dr. Molly Metz maintains a curated list of hilarious "How you doing?" scales. 2) Dr. Esther Lindenström posted about using these scales as student check-ins. 3) I was working on a blog post about using such scales to teach the basics of variables. So, I decided to create a post about three ways to use these scales in your stats classes: 1) Teaching the basics of variables. 2) Nominal vs. ordinal scales. 3) Daily check-in with your students. 1. Teach your students the basics...

Leo DiCaprio Romantic Age Gap Data: UPDATE

Does anyone else teach correlation and regression together at the end of the semester? Here is a treat for you: Updated data on Leonardo DiCaprio, his age, and his romantic partner's age when they started dating. A few years ago, there was a dust-up when a clever Redditor r/TrustLittleBrother realized that DiCaprio had never dated anyone over 25. I blogged about this when it happened. But the old data was from 2022. Inspired by this sleuthing, I created a wee data set, including up-to-date information on his current relationship with Vittoria Ceretti, so your students can suss out the patterns that exist in this data.

Logical Fallacy Ref Meme

So, I love me some good statsy memes. They make a brief, important point that sticks in the heads of students. I've recently learned of the Logical Fallacy Ref meme. Here are a couple that apply to stats class:

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