Jesse’s foray into data science started with a statistics class in graduate school, where she was first introduced to R. Although her academic career as a molecular biologist didn’t quite pan out, she found herself using data science to inform both her teaching methods and curriculum development as a high school science teacher in NYC. Having moved out of a traditional classroom and into the non-profit space, she continues to combine her passion for public education with her love for data science (and R!) in creative and impactful ways.
The challenge One skill that all great educators possess is the ability to ask questions. Asking the right questions at the right time of the learners in your classroom can facilitate understanding, uncover misconceptions, and indicate whether or not learners have mastered the material.
However, when you’re learning on your own you have to simultaneously fill the roles of both learner and educator, and not only know both how and when to ask yourself questions, but also answer your questions, evaluate your answers, and redirect your learning path as you progress.
The problem I’ve been working with preliminary student State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR) data pulled from the Data Interaction portal. The data I’m interested in includes proficiency levels for every subject for every individual school, disaggregated by all available demographic splits.
Because downloading all of the data will likely require building a webcrawler, I’ve started this project by working with a small subset of 20 Elementary and Middle Schools in the Dallas Independent School District (DISD) for the 2018 school year.
Introduction As all amazing opportunities in my life are wont to do, it started with a tweet:
…which resulted in me spending last Friday talking data science education with some of the great folks at JHU, largely centered on work happening with the Chromebook Data Science project.
It’s rare that I find myself dealing with imposter syndrome, but I did spend Thursday night eating all of my feelings of doubt and insecurity.
Learning to learn can be… well, challenging I find myself on social media for the longest stretches of time when I’m just beginning a project. Social media is a fantastic distraction from getting started, because burying yourself in the seratonin hits from a Like or :heart: is far more pleasant than staring at the sheer amount of project yet to do.
It doesn’t even have to be a big project to send us into a perpetual state of procrastination.
When in Doubt My summer started with a bang:
The end of a long-term relationship A surprisingly difficult - but completely treatable - medical diagnosis The illness and eventual passing of a beloved family member Each of these items paced themselves perfectly and provided an ongoing (and most welcome!) sense of relief that beautifully masked my growing disinterest and discontent with my place in the R community. With each of these big ordeals happening in rapid succession, I didn’t have time to feel guilty about the ever-present sense of apathy for projects that once were my reason for getting out of bed in the morning.