Saturday, August 16, 2003: I can't begin to tell you how much fun it was to start in seriously putting up the statistics preparations and lectures. It's been two years since I taught it, and I had forgotten how much I love teaching it. But the heat wave is unbearable, and I'm having to go slow. This morning when I tackled it again, I thought of all you who were so panicked at the very thought of statistics, and I thought about our theme this semester of answerability and its importance to community. The painting I put up is my imaginary of what it would feel like to take statistics without Bakhtin's aesthetic process of answerability in place. I'd do a second version with answerability in place, but it hasn't come to me yet. Besides, now I really do have to get back to the preparatations. This may be a short issue, as I try to get all the syllabi and preps up before school.

Our topic this week suggests how prejudice works. You're caught in a class where math is hard, for your teacher as well as you. The teacher has status and privilege to preserve based on her knowledge of the subject, so she can't let you know that the numbers scare her, too. And whenever we worry about having to go beyond what we're sure we know, we puff up like academcic bullfrogs, so people won't notice we're scared. Academic bullfrogs don't tolerate answerability. They speak only in monologic non-answerable utterances or croaks that hide safely behind their titles of authority.

Then stimulus response theory comes into play. Remember B.F. Skinner and his cats and rats? If every time you go to stat class you panic, and it doesn't feel good at all, you identify the panic and the pain with statistics - for which most of you have long experience with numbers and math, period. So very, very soon, someone says "Statistics . . . " and you say "Oh, I hate it . . . I can't do it." Not so. That's a spurious conclusion. What you can't do is learn about numbers from someone else who is scared of the numbers, too. Jerome Bruner: If a teacher knows her material well enough, she can teach it to fourth graders. After which he proceeded to teach Anthropology to fourth graders at Harvard.

A spurious conclusion, since it's part of statistics anyway, is one in which we draw a false connection between variables because they seem to be connected, and we don't explore deeply enough to discover that something else is going on beyond the obvious. There's an old joke about it:

Drank gin and water. Got drunk.
Drank vodka and water. Got drunk.
Drank scotch and water. Got drunk.
Drank bourbon and water. Got drunk.

Gee, drinking water makes you drunk. Well, it is the only variable that occured in all four instances in which he got drunk.

But now, if we go further. Beyond the numbers into the effectiveness of the measurement, we could say:

Drank alcohol in gin. Added water. Got drunk.
Drank alcohol in vodka. Added water. Got drunk.
Drank alcohol in scotch. Added water. Got drunk.
Drank alcohol in bourbon. Added water. Got drunk.

And now we have two variables present in all four instances in which he got drunk.

But just in case we have any doubts left, we could try another version, leaving out the water:

Drank gin which has alcohol in it. Got drunk.
Drank vodka which has alcohol in it. Got drunk.
Drank scotch which has alcohol in it. Got drunk.
Drank bourbon which has alcohol in it. Got drunk.

Gee, it looks like alcohol makes you drunk, no matter what drink it's in, and no matter whether you drink water with it.

Numbers, math, statistics, get the same bum rap in school that water gets in the joke above. Misery and unsuccessful tests or homework or whatever happened to you when numbers were involved. So you concluded spuriously that numbers were the culprit. Now, it's time to go back and reinterpret those earlier experiences. You have to. Otherwise, it's numberism. And discrimination is a no-no in classes on peace and social justice.