I find “Christian” and “Christianity” to be descriptive of a lot of things and nothing all at once. At the question, “Are you a Christian?” I’m almost at a loss for a response given how many different people will claim “Christian” as a default label.

Give my penchant for occasional profanity and for what many assume is self-aggrandizement, I don’t rep Christianity much from my blog. I just hate the idea that my flaws and sharp edges would turn someone off from the legitimately cool teachings of Christ.

What do you mean by “flawed”? What does Christianity mean to you?

I am still thinking about that dip at the high end of the curve, but that could FINALLY help me understand why I’m 42 and still single. Something about people being intimidated by the “too perfect?”

And finally, I must reflect back to Jerry Seinfeld saying that 95% of the population are undatable:

Jerry: Have ya been to the Motor Vehicle Bureau? Its a leper colony there.
Elaine: So, basically what you’re saying is 95% of the population is undatable?
Jerry: UNDATABLE.
Elaine: So how are all these people gettin’ together?
Jerry: Alcohol.

I wish my school now offered a statistics course at all. I haven’t integrated it nearly enough this year. Dan, thanks for providing ideas of how to connect the statistics to my courses.

Here’s my question… and this is not based on tons of serious scholasticism, but it’s something I’ve thought about a bit and it was trigger by your “Calc is your reward for Alg II” comment.

What is the most important math that kids retain? Alg I — I see it. Makes sense to me. Geo — same. Got it.

What I see, however, is a world where the phrase “data-driven” is more and more used, and very few people seem to really understand how to use data in meaningful ways — and worse, very few people seem to know how to judge / make sense of data. Show too many people a graph, and you get a sense that there’s this thought, “It’s got MATH in it, it MUST be true!”

Does it make more sense to teach kids how to really examine, judge, create statistics, etc… so that we increase the level of math literacy? Would giving kids a one or two year sequence of that as an alternative to the Calc track make sense?

Practically speaking, though, I’ve got no beef with any of that. The second track would be much less challenging, for whatever it’s worth, and I don’t think Probability or Statistics or its hybrid could sustain two years. There just isn’t enough material.