by Nick Toebben
As I was finishing my undergraduate degree at Wake Forest, I started to feel more and more like a machine. In a bid to graduate on time, nine of my final ten courses were in statistics—it was as numerical of a schedule as one could devise. As I progressed, I noticed that the better I became at being a statistician, the worse I felt I was at being a human. My life in my final year of undergraduate had become too routine, too emotionless—robotic, if you will—and I wanted to help my students this year avoid that sentiment.
I assist with the senior capstone course for statistics, and I’m not sure how many of my students like me. In fact, I’m fairly certain that a few of them really dislike me. But that’s okay, because machines don’t feel affection or hatred, so at least my students are feeling something! Teaching a writing-intensive course has really helped refresh my love for my own humanness (or, at the very least, study for the Turing Test), and I try in all of my critiques and assessments to enthuse my students about their humanness, as well.
I want my students to incarnate themselves in their written work inasmuch as statistics assignments might allow, and, as such, the professors, other TA, and I try to structure assignments and prompts in ways that let students express themselves while also practicing some of the more intricate details of statistics writing. Our assignments have ranged from self-introductions to explaining concepts to a relative or boss to more formalized reports written as explanations to clients, and I’ve been very interested in seeing the breadth of styles in responses.
Quite a few students have had very clear ‘voices’ in their writing from the beginning, whereas others did not develop any appreciably individualized style until near the end of the semester (or, for that matter, at all). Some students write very conversationally, and while their pieces are enthusiastic and clear, we hope they will don a more formal tone in their final reports. Other students always write as if they were submitting to a client or a journal; with these students, my biggest challenge is to ensure that their message is clear and concisely expressed through the complexity of their language and structure. I also wonder if they really talk to their grandmother like that.
All in all, I want my students to be able to channel some of their own humanness into their work and to be proud of what they created.
The WIP placed a lot of emphasis this semester on responding to student work, and I have made a real effort to implement those practices in my class. When I give feedback to my students, I try to prompt rather than to prescribe; I want them to know the thoughts and perspective of the reader, but I do not want to tell them what to do with that. I believe that not only will this make them better writers by forcing them to question for themselves how they should address the reader’s thoughts and concerns (or whether they should regard them at all), but it also preserves in them their human autonomy. In other classes, students are told what to do in response to certain problems (e.g. take a transformation when you see heteroscedasticity, or drop a variable in response to multicollinearity), and I want to give them both the realization that writing does not necessarily have the same style of prescriptive answers and the chance to explore their own judgments in response. Likewise, when I encounter poor structures or strange choices, I recommend a solution, but I never demand it. I want to avoid “appropriating” their texts, as Nancy Sommers described it, as I might appropriate the outputs of the statistical programs on my computer.
All in all, I want my students to be able to channel some of their own humanness into their work and to be proud of what they created. Statistical writing offers them a few basic advantages that the rest of statistics cannot: it is one of the critical few things at which humans are superior to machines, and it gives a feeling of creation that I have found unparalleled in the rest of the field. Although not everyone is ‘there’ yet, I hope that throughout the next semester, all of my students can feel that same glimmer, spark, and sense of accomplishment I feel when writing. And, hopefully, I can get all of them to like me by then, too.
Nick is a second year Masters student in the Statistics Department. Despite his mathematical major, he’s always had a fond affection for writing. You can probably catch him biking around campus, playing basketball at the gym, or practicing his ukulele when he isn’t working.