Andrew Zieffler

Here are a couple of pictures from the University of Minnesota’s 2022 commencement. Two of our statistics education students walked and were hooded: Chelsey Legacy and Jonathan Brown! From Left: Mireya Smith, Yoo Jeong Jang, Chelsey Legacy, and Jonathan Brown. Statistics Education also had a good presence at the 2022 Student Orientation. Regina Lisinker, a second year MA student, and Pablo Vivas Corrales, a first year MA student from Costa Rica, were on hand to welcome in the new academic year.

Here are a couple of things that I have read that I wanted to share. Math Phobia: An American Crisis The first was a short piece in the Harvard Business Review called Americans Need to Get Over Their Fear of Math. The author, Sian Beilock, paints the thesis that math phobia is a liability for the U.S. given the importance of STEM skills and jobs to the current marketplace. Here is the quote that stood out to me:

Sometime over the pandemic I read a book called Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown. It was a classic business-ish time management book in which the premise is be more selective in how you spend your time and effort. Like most of these books, the author came across a bit cultish in his zeal for this, and the thesis was hammered via way too much repetitiveness.

I went to the Arc today and bought several books. (It’s hard to beat a price tag of 2.99!) So, in the spirit of Nick Hornby’s column in the Guardian, I thought I would chronicle these books along with the reason I bought each. BOOKS BOUGHT: Bruce—Peter Ames Carlin: A biography of Bruce Springsteen, bought because he is The Boss. Going for a Beer and A Night at the Movies or, You Must Remember This—Robert Coover: I got into Coover’s work after reading a book on writing in which he was featured in a chapter.

This last weekend I competed in KVSC’s annual Trivia Weekend. Usually this is a 50 consecutive hour contest, but for 2021, it was only 33 hours. The last few years I competed with the team Take Me Back to Hackensack and we finished 31st out of 58 teams. Here is a photo of our team for this year. This year we had a small team; between 2 and 6 players, depending on the hour, with four of us that were the base.