The Crutch - epilogue

Since the instructor gave us a chance to gain three points back, I got a 76.5 out of 80! That's a 95.6% - the first A I have EVER gotten on a Stats test. Even without the regained points I still would have an A, with a 91.8%!

The best part is completely juvenile, but I feel like any facade of maturity this blog ever had was torn away long ago, so I'll share it with you... Next to my score, the instructor wrote, "Very Good!"

Take THAT Mrs. Storch! (Mrs. Storch was the third grade teacher who ridiculed me for not knowing my multiplication tables. I hold her personally responsible as the origin of my math block...).

Mrs. Storch is dead now, I'm sure - she was about 108 when I was in the third grade... which was just after the Civil War... those were hard times in my home town of Burlington, NC... fucking carpetbaggers... "reconstruction" my ass.

At any rate, I am finally shaking off her influence. I do not love stats, but I actually understood the stuff on the test, and today in class, I was able to follow the new material that was presented as well. I may actually get an A in this class...

The Crutch, Part II

Let me begin this by saying I am not a stupid person. I score well on IQ tests, am eligible for admission to Mensa, and have posted very respectable scores on the SAT and GRE. In fact, I'm usually the guy that screws up the curve for everyone else in class.

In statistics, however, I'm the dumb kid. I'm the guy who asks questions that are almost relevant. I hold up progress, and say stupid things like, "Wait - the null hypothesis does what now? And what does sigma stand for?" (Despite my thickness where statistics are concerned, I pride myself on never asking that most annoying of all dumb kid question; "Is this going to be on the test?" Damn, I want to hit that kid... but I digress.)

Where was I? Oh, right - I'm stat disabled. I'm the kid that wears a helmet but is in your class anyway because the administration thought he should "mainstreamed." Out of courtesy, I sit right up front. That way the instructor can see the confused look on my face before I even raise my hand, and the other students can glare at me without having to crane their necks around. I try to stay quiet and not drool too much.

So, as you can imagine, stats is pretty much like a semester-long root canal for me. Carrying that metaphor as far as it will go, test days are those special times when the anesthesia has worn off. Last Friday was one such day.

But Friday was different. On Friday, I was no longer stats disabled. On Friday I became stats handi-capable!

Actually, Friday was just the culmination of a process I began a few weeks ago, when this stats class was ramping up into a never ending gobstopper of shite. I decided that I had to figure out how to use the stats package in my calculator.

Yes - THAT calculator. The Cursed Calculator of Sorrow.

As I mentioned earlier, the manual is less than helpful. The great irony of these machines is that only those who have a very solid grasp of the mathematical principles involved - i.e., not me - can actually use them. The vaguely titled functions hang in the menus like the grapes above Tantalus, while actual understanding of the concepts recedes below me like his pool. (The big rock overhead is my grade in the class, just to round out the image...) But enough Bullfinching - how did I become handi-capable?

I shifted metaphors, moving from one neighborhood in Tartarus to another. I left Tantalus, and went to hang with Sisyphus. Deciphering the TI-83 became my rock, and like the Sisyphus that Camus imagined, I tried to embrace the task. "The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart." I doubt that even Camus believed that ALL the time, but it was enough to get me by.

Over the course of several weeks and many dozens of Google searches and dead-ends, I discovered enough pages offering TI-83 tutorials that I was able to assemble a set of instructions that actually work for the material I am studying. Why no one has compiled this all in one place is a mystery to me, but I finally found what I needed on about 8 or 9 different sites. Now, with a few strokes of the keys I can give you a binomial probability, create a one variable statistical array, or any of several other perviously time-consuming and onerous tasks regularly required of stats wonks.

Although I don't claim to understand the underlying principles very well, I can get by now. Instead of being a cursed hunk of circuits collecting dust on my bookshelf, the TI-83 has finally become useful. It's a crutch, and I am a one-legged man who is immobilized without it. Together we hobble toward a decent grade.

I like to think that the failed engineer's demons are being put to rest like so many unwanted math thetans. Each successful quiz, every completed homework problem, shakes a few more bad vibes from behind its LCD. Some day soon I'll be done with stats, and I think it will then be clear of all the taint of failure. On that day, I'm sure I'll be tempted to walk up to some kid in the labs and say, "You want this?"

The Crutch, Part I

Like many students taking college level math, I use the trusty TI-83 calculator. It has a nice stats package built right in, but it's not what I'd call user friendly. The inputs it needs to work its demon magic and spit out binomial distributions, factorials, and cumulative probabilities are not prompted - you have to memorize the input format, and enter the correct arguments, separated by commas, for it to work. The instruction manual that comes with the TI-83 explains it all, but in a format so dry that it makes C++ programming guides look like beach reading.

To further complicate matters I never had the manual for the one I have. My TI-83 became mine after it had failed someone else...

I was working in the all-night lab one night about 4 years ago. It was around 4:30 in the morning, and just after midterms. A sleepy looking kid, one of my regulars, came up to me at the lab assistant's desk and said, "You want this?" He was holding out a slightly battered TI-83. I looked up, puzzled, and assumed that he had just found it and was turning it in to our lost and found.

"Sure, I'll put it in the lost and found."

He shook his head. "It's not lost - it's mine."

By then I had already taken it from him, so I paused, holding it awkwardly between us. "What do you... I mean... ok, I'm confused." I set it on the desk.

"I don't need it anymore. I'm changing majors. Engineering kicked my ass." With that, he walked away.

I stared at the thing. Like any good liberal arts major, I eyed the black, brick-like machine in much the same way the Spanish Inquisition viewed astronomical instruments. It was a heretical wizard's engine, and I wanted no part of it. Not only was it a tool intended mostly for minions of the hard sciences, it was also the calculator of a failed student. Despite the late hours he had put into his line of study, he'd been beaten by it. It seemed tainted in some way, like the psychic remnants of his dream of becoming an engineer lingered about it. In truth, it was probably his parents' dream that he become an engineer, but no matter. Someone's dream had broken upon its plastic carapace, and it felt of the grave.

Still, it was an expensive calculator, and I figured the kid would get some sleep, realize what he'd done, and come back for it. I stuck it in the seldom-used front pocket of my backpack, figuring I'd see him in the next few nights and give it back to him.

In that front pocket it sat - for two years. I never saw its former owner again. Freed of his engineering burden, he may have fled the state, for all I know. The calculator stayed there, in fact, until I finally bought a new backpack, and then it was relegated to a shelf in my room. I referred to it as "that kid's calculator" but slowly I came to think of it as the "calculator of failure." It was a doomed calculator, a "+2 calculator of angst" if you will. Like any good cursed magical item, it sat on a shelf collecting dust, awaiting its next victim.

Fast forward to last semester, day one of STATS 2070. The syllabus stated, "a scientific calculator is required." For a moment I dreaded going to the bookstore and getting reamed for about $100, but then I remembered that I had the cursed calculator. I went home, found it, and dusted it off.

[Next Installment: Does a set of new batteries suffice for an exorcism?]