statistics

My class for this six-week quarter is Research Design. I am still reading the introductory chapters in my textbooks wherein they state the obvious. They should have two classes tacked onto any program of study for a Master’s in Education: Stating the Obvious to the Oblivious and Complaining about No Child Left Behind. Hopefully, this class will be better then the last in that respect. I think we can move past the bi-partisan folly of NCLB.

Ultimately, however I have solved the most important question of them all: what happens to socks when they disappear in the dryer. I do not need to be lectured or read about how to do principled, authentic, academic research. I make things up fine enough on my own.

Due to my research, we all know that Central Intelligence Agency has a portal in every dryer in America where in the agency takes a random survey of who is doing what, based on our socks and the information we leave there. When the Agency is done with the socks, they stuff them into the couch in my classroom where the children argue over who they belong to until I scream, “FOR THE LOVE OF KOALAS, JUST THROW IT OUT.” That is the only reasonable explanation for the missing socks and why they end up in my classroom couch.

I was thinking about this during Mass and when I tuned back in during the homily the pastor was talking about how it takes eighty thousand bees flying around the world three times to make enough honey for a plastic bear full. I had just read an article in the Atlantic Monthly where they gave the technical term for people who come up with those statistical statements. In my day, we just called them nerds. Those quantifications are always absurd to me, “moving all the troops and supplies to Saudi Arabia for the first Gulf War was the equivalent of moving the entire state of Alaska.” Which it was not – if we had moved Alaska to Saudi Arabia, the Republicans would have already drilled all the oil in that nature preserve.

In viewing those statements as absurd, I feel it important that I learn how to make them myself so that I can litter my research project with them. I really do not think that I should need a great deal of math to bring these enumerations to life - I will bet on the fact that no one will question me. In fact, it would take seventeen graduate students, using thirty six pencils a day for forty days and forty nights just to figure out that I was chock full of crap let alone the seven PhDs working round the clock for three years, each using an abacus (I know not the plural of abacus, abaci? ) to figure out where I was wrong in my math and reasoning.

Comments

[Fi]

I always assumed that socks were the pupal stage of wire coathangers. It was a theory that explained all the odd socks and also explained the burgeoning number of coathangers in my wardrobe. Thanks to you, now I know i am wrong.

If you happen to find any pure wool black or khaki "stockpile" socks (that look like they belong to my husband) down the back of that couch.......could you send them back home? His feet are cold.

[Alex Vance]

What's the deal on that No Child Left Behind thing? Do you have to let military recruiters on campus?

[liz]

AlexVance is too funny.
As a prerequisite to my masters' program, you have to swear an oath to do everything in your power to ridicule NCLB at every possible opportunity.

[Suburban Island]

I knew it was the CIA that was responsible for the missing socks. I've written several sock posts myself pondering the why and wherefore of it. You statistics are better than the number of bees flying around the world to make honey for the little plastic bears.