Statistical Excitement- 1512 post #1

This week, we jump right into analyzing numbers. Yippee! I have a love/hate relationship when it comes to doing statistics. I love getting the answer right, I love the process of doing a problem, I just hate punching in all the numbers into a calculator or rearranging them in ascending order. I don't have patience for tedious work. Which is kind of funny if you think about it, my goal is to become a teacher and that has plenty of tedious work associated with it. Doing tedious work, and doing it well will make me successful as a teacher, I just have to remember how important it is to do. My love/hate relationship has more of a positive correlation towards love compared to hate as I receive a lot of satisfaction out of putting all the pieces of a problem together. 
I remember taking a course in college on statistics and having some fun with it. Though, I always had trouble keeping straight the definitions of the mean and median. These are the nuts and bolts of statistics and I would keep mixing the two of them up. It took me for awhile before I came up with this great reminder for myself, just think of the middle of the road. What do you see in the middle of the road? The median, so your middle value of a set, is the median. This is something I never forgot over the years and it came in handy for this weeks' homework.
What do all these answers mean though? That is where statistics becomes fun. With statistics, you can really make the numbers look more in your favor when the odds may be against you. I always enjoy the campaign season when the news will project who is leading in the polls. There is always a discrepancy between each news outlet and who they figure is leading in the polls. That is why it is always important to look closely at the legend of any graph to ensure you know what data you are receiving.