Tyler George completed his PhD in statistics and analytics at Central Michigan University where he also studied math and statistics education. He teaches at a small liberal arts college, Cornell College, and he has been working on research on video games in statistics classrooms, developing a course investigating inequities in Iowa housing services, and developing a study abroad trip in the UK about the history of statistics. Find him on Twitter: @stats_tgeorge, Github: stats-tgeorge, and Fosstodon: @stats_tgeorge.
Why did you decide to go into Statistics/Statistics Education?
Mathematics was a love since I was a child, before I knew what statistics was. My excitement for teaching others was discovered when I started tutoring math as a middle school student. Eventually I discovered statistics and how its applications enabled me to work with data in a large array of other domains of knowledge. Now I work with undergraduates in chemistry, biology, computer science, psychology, and more!
What's a class/workshop at your workplace/university that you wish you could take and why?
My college has an animations course that I keep hearing great things about and it sounds so fun!
What Statistics Topic do you think is the most difficult to teach well?
The proper meaning and use of p-values given the misconceptions students start a course with.
What advice would you give to someone who is new to teaching statistics?
Use existing resources. Our field’s textbooks generally offer TONS of teaching resources such as slides and textbook solutions that are a great place to build off of for a new-to-you course. My other advice would be to encourage you to have faculty in your own department and across the college/university sit in a session of your class. They will generally pick up on things in your class you otherwise wouldn't notice and may have new great ideas! I picked faculty that were also new to my college so we could help each other become better teachers.
What is your go-to source for data?
This one changes for every course but I honestly use textbooks from my other courses for classroom items like quizzes and exams. The Lock5 textbook and the Stat2 book (Cannon et al.) have very large lists of datasets. Beyond that, our section website has multiple data resource links I've used recently, some of which allow you to search for data by the topic you are going to teach.
What statistics class(es) are you currently teaching? What statistics classes do you enjoy teaching the most?
I teach a good variety of courses but half of my courses are introductory statistics. Beyond those, I teach time series, a second statistics course, a third advanced regression course, and an introductory data science course. My favorites are probably introductory statistics and introductory data science - something about inspiring new students to major or minor in statistics fuels my passion for the fields.
What do you enjoy doing when you’re not working?
Well I don't have a good random sample but some bad point estimates are 50% of my free time is wrangling my 3 dogs, 25% is playing board games, and the last 25% is playing video games.
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