Notes on Starting Teaching – Week 2

This week, I gathered data on my students on ‘romantic’ success, and constructed a histogram based on that information. Purpose? To teach them sampling distributions. The question in essence is:

Count how many persons you’re interested in that you asked out in the last six months (don’t have to be a date and the other party does not have to know that you’re interested). Successful invites adds 1 to romantic success score, rejections subtracts 1, if you did not try, you’re at 0.

The lecturer claims to have more than 6 romantic successes within the same time. Calculate the probability that he’s lying based on your class statistics as the population assuming that the romantic success distribution is approximately a normal distribution.

It caught their attention alright, but I hope in the right way :P. The data we gathered:

Romantic Success of Class (Click to Enlarge)

From the chart, you can see that some joker claims to have 17 romantic successes within 6 months. Most claim that they didn’t try or had the same rate of success vs rejections. One poor guy was rejected at least 8 times. Based on their romantic success data, and assuming that my romantic success follows the same trends as theirs, we deduced from the data that there’s a 89.5% chance that I’m lying if I say that my romantic success score is 6. Bahahaha.

Also, spent all night last night trying to find the proof for the Central Limit Theorem. Found this superb tool: http://onlinestatbook.com/simulations/CLT/clt.html. Needless to say, it made the Central Limit Theorem significantly more intuitive and interesting.

So far so good. Estimation (next chapter) is a bit of a bore, but hypothesis testing (chapter after that) should be pretty fun. Hmmm… (crazy gleam in eyes).

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