Box and Whiskers

Yesterday, just as I was finally coming out from behind my desk and preparing to go home, I heard a commotion like the three bears were coming down the hall. There was a great big deep voice, a medium skeptical voice, and a tiny little sassy voice. I looked toward the door, dropped my left ear toward my shoulder, and gave a listen to the footsteps approaching my door.

The school bookkeeper, her husband, and four-year-old granddaughter paused a moment before I waved them on in. "We have a favor to ask," she told me, then crossed her arms, raised her eyebrows, and cut her eyes at her husband.

"Can I move in with you?" he asked. There was silence, and then they all started laughing.

"Good one!" his wife said. "I did not see that coming."

"You know we have an extra room," I laughed, too, after only the briefest of hesitations, "any time you need it."

"Naw," he said, "but what I do need is some help with this here statistics homework."

I love math. In fact, I almost think I love it too much to be any kind of a good math teacher. When I was in school, math was always the dessert of my homework, and so I agreed to try and help him, even though I never actually took statistics.

He kissed his wife and granddaughter good-bye, and we sat down at one of the tables in my room. When I first looked at the 10 page assignment he showed me, I almost sent him away. The two problems on the first page included a paragraph each of incomprehensible jargon and 40 random double-digit numbers. There were phrases like "frequency table" "data set" and "classes of five starting with ten." I guess I couldn't hide the uh oh, because he was super-apologetic and showed me his indecipherable notes on the power point outline he had. This was an open admissions college class, and he told me that they were on their third instructor before the mid-term. "When is this due?" I asked him.

"Tonight," he sighed. "I don't know what I was thinking taking a full load of classes and trying to work, too." he said. He was a carpenter, and it turned out that he would get a raise at work and a shot at a promotion once he earned a college degree, and since the family could use the extra money, he wanted to get it done as fast as he could, so he was enrolled for 12 credit hours. Monday through Thursday, his day started at 4:30 AM when he got up for work and didn't end until way after 9:30 PM when his class was over. He tried to get his homework done on the weekend and in between work and the time when his class started.

"Do you have the book?" I asked him. And so we figured it out together, I consulting the index and the examples in the text, he using his notes and telling me what he remembered from the three teachers he'd had. Side by side we sat, me and this gigantic tattooed ex-con of a guy who smelled really, really good, and whose fingers were way too big for the calculator keys. As we worked, I realized that the stuff that was easiest for me to do was the hardest to explain to him, and I filed that away under, "in your face master teacher," to be taken out and examined at another time.

We were getting close to finishing, and I had the sense that he had stopped trying to understand a while ago-- he was going to be late for class, and all he wanted were some numbers on the page. "I wish I cared about this stuff," he said, "but I just don't." Still, he kept working, and I thought about this guy the way I think about my students sometimes. There was a tangible reward for him to take this class, and so he was compliant, but I knew that he wasn't really learning the material-- it was important, but not relevant. I wondered about the objectives of his employer, of the college, of that third instructor. Why were they putting him through these paces? What did they want? And when on earth did they think that those boxes and whiskers and stems and leaves would ever be of value to him?