Beth Chance's Visit

Joan Garfield expounds on Beth Chance's visit to the University of Minnesota October 3–4.

Last week (Editors Note: It was almost two weeks ago now since I am not too fast at posting these.) Beth Chance spent a few days with us. It began with a Sunday afternoon run around Lake Harriet, followed by dinner with my husband Michael and me, along with Andy and Lauren Zieffler. 

Early Monday morning Beth visited our experimental CATALST course, being taught by Laura Le. She collected  and summarized minute papers that students wrote about their experiences in the course and using TinkerPlots™ software.  After class Beth attended our weekly CATALST meeting with our team of Bob, Andy, me, Laura Le, Laura Ziegler , Rebekah  and Jiyoon. We debriefed that morning’s class, discussed the feedback on the minute papers, and then had a lively discussion of the next unit in the class on comparing groups using randomization tests and bootstrap confidence intervals. 

The Statistics Education Catalyst group met with Beth for lunch. Each person shared their current work and projects and Beth shared her sabbatical plans. She offered to participate on students’ doctoral committees since there are no graduate students in statistics education at Cal Poly. Beth talked a little about AP Statistics and put in a plug for people in our group to sign up to be readers this summer (along with Laura Z. who has done this for several years). Since them Michelle has completed the application and perhaps a few others will as well! 

After lunch we had a conference call with Allan and John to talk about our CATALST course and plans for the third unit which keeps evolving. The final activity of the day was a meeting with Michelle, Beth and me to talk about Beth’s involvement in co-teaching our graduate course, Becoming a Teacher of Statistics this spring. Beth will be visiting us again sometime this spring  and we look forward to her next visit!