what is your favorite teacher?
When Jean-Louis Foulley pointed out to me this page in the September issue of Amstat News, about nominating a favourite teacher, I told him it had to be an homonym statistician! Or a practical joke! After enquiry, it dawned on me that this completely underserved inclusion came from a former student in my undergraduate Estimation course, who was very enthusiastic about statistics and my insistence on modelling rather than mathematical validation. He may have been the only one in the class, as my students always complain about not seeing the point in slides with no mathematical result. Like earlier this week when after 90mn on introducing the bootstrap method, a student asked me what was new compared with the Glivenko-Cantelli theorem I had presented the week before… (Thanks anyway to David for his vote and his kind words!)
Xi'an's Og 
October 29, 2017 at 11:07 pm
Je connais ce David Smadja ! Il était dans ma promotion. J’avais comme lui suivi votre cours d’Estimation Statistique (année 2014-2015). Et en effet, je dois vous avouer que vos slides n’avaient pas fait l’unanimité !
October 14, 2017 at 9:00 am
It’s funny because in Kent your slides would receive complaints for being too much mathematical!!! Some colleagues think I should teach Bayesian Statistics as a black-box device without showing how to derive simple posteriors (Poisson-Gamma, Normal-Normal, Beta-Binomial,etc). I kind of envy you! Very frustrating (for me).
October 14, 2017 at 11:42 am
The usual complaint from my third year students is that they do not know what they have to prove.
October 14, 2017 at 2:18 pm
The last course I taught was for PhD students. I got that question. I said “everything”. Later it appeared that some of them may not have believed me.
October 14, 2017 at 5:54 pm
Do you truly want your students to “believe” you?!