Jo Hardin is a Professor at Pomona College in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics. Her research is in Statistics / Data Science Education as well as Biostatistics (novel methods for high throughput data). She loves working with undergraduate collaborators and being in the classroom.
Why did you decide to go into Statistics/Statistics Education?
I wanted to stay in college forever. I thought that being an academic was the best route toward a lifetime of interesting and curious conversations. I was right.
What's a class/workshop at your workplace/university that you wish you could take and why?
I really love the ideas in linguistics. I don't have an ear for language, but the technical similarities and differences of language across time and space fascinate me. Also, the computational aspects of understanding language are very cool and bridge so much of what we do in statistics and data science.
What Statistics Topic do you think is the most difficult to teach well?
Sampling distributions and the idea that we can quantify the variability we see from sample to sample.
What advice would you give to someone who is new to teaching statistics?
Focus first on the classroom. Build an arc to the semester. Bring in good examples that help make your points clearly. Only after you've taught the class a few times and have the bigger picture in front of you should you worry about perfect exam questions, interesting homework assignments, and gee-whiz projects.
What is your go-to source for data?
I don't have just one. I use many! TidyTuesday, Kaggle, Teaching of Statistics in the Health Sciences database, OpenIntro datasets to name just a few.
What statistics class(es) are you currently teaching? What statistics classes do you enjoy teaching the most?
I really love teaching all the different classes: quantitative literacy, intro stats, many flavors of applied statistics, and upper division theoretical statistics. It's nice to mix up which classes I'm teaching. I'll soon be teaching Introduction to Data Science which will be a fun and exciting challenge to add to my course load.
What do you enjoy doing when you’re not working?
I love running, reading, and visualizing TidyTuesday data.
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