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.
Introduction In the midst of a three week hiatus from work I’ve found myself filling my time with long-forgotten hobbies: art, baking, design, and crafting. These have been my long-neglected creative outlets, and it’s been a wonderful experience getting back into them.
Through a series of wonderings I found myself deciding that I could absolutely, 100% crochet a blanket. I had crocheted a bit as a kid, having learned enough to make a mountain of dishcloths.
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.