Statistics: My Favorite Way to Die

The New Jersey Department of Education recently released the state school report cards. While students are used to seeing their report cards four times a year, every school in the state receives one report card annually. This report card goes into detail about students' test score results (including the graduation exams and the elementary school-aged kids exams and SAT scores), attendance rates, average teacher salaries, and variety of other pieces of information unique to each school.

The newspaper for which I work covers about five towns, so you can imagine how my day at work went today. For most of the morning and part of the afternoon, I found myself drowning statistics. After doing the first two towns, I started to get the hang of what each figure meant. The report card really breaks it down into terms that even I, a non recepient of a math degree, could understand.

Granted, it took a while.

Mathematics have never been my favorite subjects. I did decently well in math. When I was a senior in high school, I got straight A's in my math class and was exempt from the final. The teacher is still bitter about it. But, here's the moral of the blog this week:

Despite my personal feelings about mathematics, they turn out to be a necessary evil. Every day, I use math in some way. I balance my check book (or attempt to), calculate tips in my head at restaraunt (take that cell phone EZ tip finder!), and figure out if I have enough money to accomodate my occassional spending sprees.

Statistics was a nightmare for me. I took an introduction to stats course at a community college during the summer and the plan was the transfer the credits to my regular four year college so I wouldn't have to waste time during the school year for a class I didn't see any purpose for. It would have gone swimmingly, had I not gotten a D in the course. So, I retook it. For the most part, I did all right. I asked for a lot of help, spent many, many hours studying until I was beyond postive that I understood what was going on. My hard work paid off when I got an A in the class, a class that I'll reiterate that I was positive I was never, ever going to need as an English major.

But today, I found out different. Today, I found out why I took stats. No, I'm not using binomial distrubution. No, I'm not figuring out the co-efficient. No, I'm not even trying to reteach myself how to find the standard distribution for the figures about how much students improved in their math scores over the last two years. But I did have to read and interpret the scores. I did have to sift through the 100 or so pages of data and come up with some kind of story explaining them. It helps to know where the numbers came from so I can try and put that into layman's terms for my readers.

So that's my rationale for why stats are important, even for an English major. Some of it, no you're certainly never going to see it again. I've already decided that I'm slitting my wrists if I ever have to use the binomial distribution function (the reason I failed the summer class and got an A- instead of an A+ in the fall class). But I had to interpret stats and explain them. I had to use them.

If you're sitting in a stats class now, I feel for you. Seriously. For us word-minded folks, it has the potential to be a complete nightmare. For me, at least, it was. But hard work and the occassional crying to anyone that I thought might be able to explain things to me paid off in the end and made my morning much easier.

Ready, Set, Go

This is what happens: You're sitting in your office at work thinking to yourself, gee, I'm kind of bored because nobody is calling me back and I can't finish this news article until people call me back.

So you're sitting there at your desk and then you have an epiphany: Start a Blog!

Blog is such a strange word. Not personally my favorite, but whatever. But since this scenario is typical of my Thursdays and Fridays in the newsroom, starting a blog is what I decided to do. Here's who this blog is NOT for:

1) If you hate writing and hate reading about writing, you've stumbled into the wrong blog-o-sphere.
2) If you hate listening to someone talk about poor grammar and the like, you're in the wrong place.
3) If you hate people that talk about Shakespeare like he's the 13th apostle and can't understand what people see in Truman Capote, go away now.
4) If you don't know what the virgule is, game on! You're going to learn when I start my series, "My Favorite Marks of Punctuation."
5) If you don't give two hoots about my adventures in journalism, this is also not the blog for you.

Through my experiences and relations, I hope at least somebody can take something away from this. The goal is eventually to turn the blog entries into some kind of book, but we'll see how that goes. I'll probably be posting more than once a week, depending on how busy I am at work or how late I'm up at night wishing I had something to me awake while I'm hanging out on AIM.

So suit up and get your game on and enjoy The Writer's Life.

Ps.> Brownie points to whoever can tell me where the blog name, "Words, Words, Words" is quoted from. ;)

*Rebecca W.