Seven things that make me grumble about Methodology & Statistics II

1. ‘Hi, I’m your primary lecturer for this course. I’m not really THAT into statistics, as I’m just a Master’s Student but I’m sure it will suffice’.  100 yaws dropped. Why don’t we get a prof, like in our first year?
2. ‘What I’m going to uh explain, uh, is uh, how, uh, we uh (ad finitem)’. I’ve seen first years give better presentations
3. Three hours of worthless lecture that covers barely 5% of my high school philosophy course.
4. I hate my general methods of science teacher (a high school course, mandatory for everyone in all of the Netherlands, whether they do a science-oriented track or not) for spending soooo much time on Popper. Now I can mentally talk along with the lecturer, as he stumbles to explain what falsification is.
5. It’s a sign of weakness if you need to bash Christians in order to make your point. FYI, ‘because there are no journal articles in it’ isn’t the strongest argument against creationism. Also, it was rather ironic how you contradicted yourself regarding paradigms and the need to be willing to explore alternative paradigms – but I’ll leave that for now.
6. ‘We’re going to help you think in a scientific way’. You’re rather late to teach us this, if you’re serious.
7. ‘We’re going to teach you how you can open the full text version of an article on pubmed.com’. No comment.

The worst of all of it is: I actually like methodology and statistics. They totally ruin it by this excuse for a lecturer. I’ve had lectures by teaching assistants from my own year that were LOADS better. And perhaps it would help if they didn’t feel the need to repeat everything we’ve covered during first and second year: I doubt we’re going to learn anything more difficult than the Chi square method. REALLY. Am I weird for actually liking statistics?

 

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