Maria Farrell isn’t too happy with her introductory statistics course. There are a couple of points in the comments to her post that I think are key:

• “Statistics is a practice, not a toolkit.”—Bill Tozier.
• “I wonder if the obscurity is partly a result of a lack of the why of statistics.”—Randolph Fritz.

I was in my chair’s office today talking about how my methods class was going, and the second point was one we both hit upon.

Next year, I’d like to move more in the direction of applied data analysis. This year I’ve been doing baby steps in that direction—every student has a CD with R Commander, and I show how to use R Commander to do every statistical procedure we go over by hand… for the moment, I’ve been using the Chile data set included in the car package as my “guinea pig” data.

I also think that students do better when the professor is engaged and enthusiastic about the material; this, of course, applies to any class from intro on up, but I think it’s particularly important when the class is one that students approach with some degree of resistance.