The other day I was painting the trim on our house and it got me reminiscing. The year was 2005. The conference was JSM. The location was Minneapolis. I had just finished my third year of graduate school and was slotted to present in a Topic Contributed session at my first JSM. The topic was Implementing the GAISE Guidelines in College Statistics Courses. My presentation was entitled, Using GAISE to Create a Better Introductory Statistics Course.
We had just finished doing a complete course revision for our undergraduate course based on the work we had been doing with our NSF-funded Adapting and Implementing Innovative Material in Statistics (AIMS) project. We had rewritten the entire curriculum, including all of our assessments and course activities.
The discussant for the session was Robin Lock. In his remarks about the presentations, Lock compared the re-structuring of a statistics course to the remodeling of a house. He described how some teachers restructure their courses according to a plan doing a complete teardown and rebuild. He brought the entire room to laughter as he described most teachers’ attempts, however, as “paint and patch,” fixing a few things that didn’t work quite so well, but mostly just sprucing things up.
The metaphor works. I have been thinking about this for the last eight years. Sometimes paint-and-patch is exactly what is needed. It is pretty easy and not very time consuming. On the other hand, if the structure underneath is rotten, no amount of paint-and-patch is going to work. There are times when it is better to tear down and rebuild.
As another academic year approaches, many of us are considering the changes to be made in courses we will soon be teaching. Is it time for a rebuild? Or will just a little touch-up do the trick?
