Cite your sources

As I sat in my seat I half listened to my lecture. I knew that I would have to take the test at another time because I would be out of town. I would have more time to study, which ment more time to slack off. Everything was going great until I honed in on one subject.

"I use more text books than the one we have in class to present the lecture," my professor began, "the tests from now on will be based on the lecutre rather than the text. If I didn't have a background in sociology I wouldn't understand anything in that book. I feel that students learn better when I lecture them from different sources."

So began my note taking again. I feverishly wrote whatever was on the slide show until he stopped at one with statistics. He mentioned that we didn't have to write it down because we didn't need to know the numbers but I noticed that each statistic was a little far fetched so I asked him where he got his sources.

"Probably from the census buro, I really don't know." Was his answer.

I took it and went back to writing down notes until he got to an average. I know that there are three different kinds of averages, mean, median, and mode. People often feel that mean and average are the same thing and can use these words interchangibly but that isn't so. There are companies out there that will use this to cheat the numbers to make the statistics say things that really aren't there.

"Now the average," began my professor once again.

I raised my hand.

"Yes."

"Well, the average isn't always the mean, it could be the median..."

"No, the average is always the mean. When you take the median it's the middle number of a group of numbers. The average is..." I started to drown him out at that point so I didn't start throwing things at him. Maybe I could trip his pigeon toed feet. But alas, I did nothing of the sort, I just waited for class to be over so I could jet out of there as fast as possible.