Kind of mindblowing

I was writing this week's biotats homework and was casting about, thinking of inspiration for problems, and I went back in my files and found one I wrote around about 2000.

And then I realized: Many of my current students would have been anywhere from kindergarten to third grade when I wrote that.

(Yes, that makes me feel kind of old. And yes, it's more typical - or at least, it used to be, before tenure-track positions began to go the way of the giant auk - for someone to move around in his or her academic career. But I generally like it here; my colleagues are mostly sane, and I feel like I'm doing some good for the students by providing the best education I can provide them even if they're at a small regional school. (Not to brag or anything, but: I've had students come back after their first year in fairly well-thought-of graduate programs and thank me for the preparation I gave them, especially in biostats, because they found they were more prepared than some of their colleagues.)

And I realized: I could probably "recycle" this question here, and no one would have ever seen it. (I did change a few of the numbers up, just as a self-check in case someone has a bulging file from an older sibling....but I don't think I have the younger siblings of any of the students in my past classes this year).

Also, it was a question about mean vs. median, with a hypothetical small-league baseball team and why median is sometimes better than mean for reporting.*

 Anyway, I noticed the names I had given for the baseball players - some made-up names, but several from the Nero Wolfe series (I guess I was heavily into reading that, back then). Also "Phineas Finn" and a couple of taxonomists (Merrit Fernald and Warren Wagner. I suspect Wagner would have been amused by being immortalized in that way. Fernald I don't know about.) I don't know that anyone ever "gets" them - I understand that my golden-age-mystery geekery is a very small and very overlooked geekery, and maybe 1 out of 100 people know those characters, but still, I left the names in.

(* The infamous (at least, among profs here) data from the Chronicle of Higher ed about average prof salaries. Example given is for OU. Trust me, my salary - as a full professor with about 15 years standing - is just about half of that. Of course, we aren't a "doctoral institution," but still. That's why I feel my blood start to boil when the "overpaid professors" meme gets going.

And, oh yay - they have us in the list. We're eleventh percentile! Wooo! And no, I don't quite make what they quote there. There are a few people who are paid "off card" because they are in a specialty that is hard to staff, because you make so much more out in industry. I get it that ecologists aren't very valuable. I don't mind making that much less than some folks but I DO mind the "overpaid professor" meme. And especially the "overpaid and underworked" professor meme.

Maybe we need to make our affordability a selling point. I suppose we already do but I think we can safely say NO OVERPAID PROFESSORS HERE.)