The following concept is pretty different from what I normally write about, but I think it’s really neat, and hope some people will find topics like this quite interesting!

The Most Useful Course in High School (in my opinion)

If you were to ask me today what my most useful high school course was, I would have to say Data Management. Ironically, Data Management is not really a prerequisite for any but a few programs. For those of you who haven’t taken Data Management, it was a course that covered basic probability, statistics, distributions, and other things of the like. And although it is a mathematics course, I would have to say that many concepts it covered are more useful to the way in which we live than the concepts taught in any other high school course. There are far too many to count and explain, but there’s one in particular I’d like to write about today.

Frequency Distributions

One of the really neat concepts you would learn in Data Management is the idea of a frequency distribution. Many of you probably know this, and if not, it’s a pretty simple idea. A frequency distribution is basically a mathematical representation of the frequencies for possible outcomes of an event. For example, a sample frequency distribution for the grades in your 30 student class could be 10 A’s, 10 B’s, 5 C’s, and 5 D’s. These frequencies could also be represented as fractions or percentages of the total class.

Simple enough, right? In spite of its simplicity, the powerful of this concept is in recognizing that thinking in terms of frequency distributions can apply to so many more things than just the examples about classroom grades in your Data Management or Statistics textbook. One of the really cool things is that you can use the concept of frequency distributions to solve problems and make better decisions.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

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When people hear the word “teacher”, they often imagine a school teacher standing at the front of the classroom or a professor lecturing in a large university hall. Personally, I have a much broader interpretation of the word “teacher” to also include mentors, coaches, speakers, and so on.

What is a Teacher Really?

I think a teacher is anyone who imparts any knowledge or lesson on you, regardless of the content. Your parents are teachers when they teach you the personal values you have come to hold. Your sister is your teacher when she helps you with that homework problem you just can’t figure out. Your hockey coach is your teacher when he shows you that new puck handling technique.

When I say that anyone can be a teacher, that includes you. If you have experience or expertise in a particular field, be it academic or not, you have the necessary background to teach someone. At the same time, just because you can teach something, does not mean you would necessarily be good at it – an idea we will touch on later in this article.

Teachers of all types play significant roles in our lives. We may often assume that it is the student who can only benefit from this relationship. The teacher already has this knowledge or skill, and the student is the one learning; therefore, it follows that it is the student who mainly gains, right?

The Teacher Often Benefits More

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Whenever we hear about successful people in the newspaper, magazine, television, the Internet, or even directly from other people, we only hear about their success stories. We never hear about their failures, mistakes, or shortcomings. I guess it’s because hearing about other individuals’ successes are positive things, and hey, I’m all for positive things. In fact, learning about the success of other people is one of the things that inspires me the most.

Some people I’ve met have called me successful.

Well, I guess this is sort of true, depending on how you define success. When I was in Grade 8, I achieved a perfect score on the University of Waterloo’s Gauss Mathematics Contest. In my final year of high school, I won the TD Canada Trust Scholarship, selected from a pool of over 3,500 applicants. So sure, if you define stuff like that as successful, then I guess I’ve been successful.

But let’s get things straight. I have been successful in the the things that have worked out for me; you know, the things you have read about me, such as in my biography on this blog. But that isn’t the whole story. And, well, you’ll never really get the whole story. And the truth of the matter is…

I am equally unsuccessful in all of the things I’ve messed up

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