Leslie is an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Macalester College. There are few things that get her as giddy as causal inference and causal inference education. She is also passionate about alternative grading strategies and building course frameworks to inspire joy in statistics.
What's a class/workshop at your workplace/university that you wish you could take and why?
I would love to take creative writing! I have really tapped into my love of storytelling recently but have generally written about ideas or personal experiences. Learning more about creative writing would help me scratch an itch to write more fiction. There's something about fiction's power to truly change people's souls and minds that is just so cool!
What Statistics Topic do you think is the most difficult to teach well?
Teaching students the iterative nature of asking good research questions is challenging. My courses have all focused on a particular set of methods so the ability to ask truly open questions has felt a bit constrained. I have often felt that students are maneuvering their questions so that they can be answered by the tools in our course rather than starting with questions first.
What advice would you give to someone who is new to teaching statistics?
I love this quote from Teach Students How to Learn by Saundra Yancy McGuire: "At Cornell, I was what you might call a “Heinz 57 Varieties” chemistry instructor. I could explain any concept 57 different ways; I was very patient, always saying to my students, “Let me know if you don’t understand this explanation, and I will say it a different way.” I was convinced that I could figure out some way to explain it that would ensure student understanding. I now know it is absolutely not about what we say to our students; it’s about what they hear. But we don’t know what they are hearing unless they’re doing the talking." It resonates with me because as a graduate student I was exactly in the same mindset about being an awesome explainer. But now I know that teaching statistics is really about cultivating inspiring learning experiences. And that has fundamentally changed the way that I approach my job.
What is your go-to source for data?
I feel like my list of resources is ever growing! I always include the Tidy Tuesday GitHub repo, Kaggle, the UCI ML repository, Harvard Dataverse, and The Pudding's GitHub repo. I'm also interested in exploring the Open Science Framework website for datasets tied to journal articles.
What do you enjoy doing when you’re not working?
I love playing games! Board games, video games, and D&D in particular. Currently playing through Tears of the Kingdom and loving it! I also enjoy weightlifting and rock climbing.
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