I sometimes wonder how the brain works. What makes it so you can read text and see the math through your mind’s eye. Equations, symbols, numbers and principles immediately evaluate the given data and you are then presented with minor calculations to devise the answer. It’s like your brain is a white board and the Expo marker is writing feverishly to keep up with the data. It makes sense and you didn’t even try.
But then there are the others. Those who cannot seem to distinguish the tiny nuances of the problem. Where math is like a giant boulder that their mind just cannot wrap its arms around. It isn’t that they as dumb or idiotic but that their mind just doesn’t see the text in the same way.
But the question is who is luckier? Those who get it or those who don’t? For those who don’t, they have to struggle through each problem and try to figure out the correct method when it doesn’t seem obvious. It’s pretty unfortunate. But those who get it, they are the true unlucky ones. They are the ones cursed to help the countless others. The ones who have to look at one problem so many times that they not only know every part of the question but the responses to the 4th decimal without even checking their paper. They are the ones who know that the 3rd Quartile of a normal distribution falls at a z-score of approximately .675 without referencing the table in the appendix. They are the ones who have to try and explain what seems obvious into a way others can understand. And on top of it all, they are labeled the “nerds” because they “get” math.
Statistics. What a wonder world.
P. D. Griffith's P.O.V. 