BECOMING YOUR OWN DATA ANALYST

READING: WHAT DATA?

If you were to hand out a survey asking students which teachers they felt were the best and most effective, results would vary. There would be popular teachers and not-so-popular ones. (Mr. Eddings from fourth grade PE, I'm looking at you.) You could collect all of these surveys, sort through to see which teacher is "best," and announce it with an obnoxiously large trophy at a school assembly. There would also be confetti.

I love confetti as much as the next guy—more, actually—but this isn't the most accurate way of determining the best teacher because it relies solely on personal memory or sentiment. There's no data to support anything. To get a full, reliable picture of who should be showered in confetti as the school's best teacher, we would have to look at more measurable things, like which teacher's students consistently made the most progress. That's not to say that this should be our only determining factor, though. Who's to say what "best" means anyway? Qualitative feedback, like the subjective reviews from students, is important, but so is quantitative, or numerical, feedback. This means numbers.

For good or for ill, this is part of the reason schools focus on test scores and grades, and since they care about test scores and grades, so do I. It's now our job to watch our data to make ourselves more productive. Think of this like robot training. And yes, this will involve spreadsheets.

Despite the way we may remember things, numbers often tell another story. For example, we may feel like we get more homework done if we wait to do it before bed instead of right after school. It seems like we get our work done faster, at least.

But let's check the numbers. Say we look at our grades on the assignments we did before bed and find that they are, on average, one letter grade lower than the ones on assignments we did right after school. Uh-oh. It turns out this feeling we had is inaccurate. If we compared the times "before-bed" assignments and "after-school" assignments took, we may find that doing homework before bed does mean it gets done faster, but that doesn't mean it gets done well. By the numbers, we're better off doing homework right after school instead of before bed.

We can use data like this to find all kinds of patterns. It could be that on days we try to squeeze in some work before 6 p.m. practice, it takes an hour to do something that, otherwise, would only take a half hour. There could be various reasons for this, of course. Maybe we're trying to multi-task and chat with friends at the same time, or we're always hungry and tired around then, but for whatever reason, this isn't our best time to try to get stuff done. It costs us double the time! That's fluff study time, and it needs to go.

Instead, suppose we get up an hour earlier and do that work before school instead of before practice. Sure, we have to get up earlier, but we do a few jumping jacks and have a hot shower and sit down to work. Suddenly, the quiet morning clarity means our half-hour assignment gets done in 20 minutes. That's an extra 10 minutes we can use for something else, and that adds up faster than parking tickets.

P.S., I know getting up early isn't everyone's favorite idea, but it is far and away the number one thing that business-world rock stars say they do to increase their productivity. Some even get up at 5:00 a.m. just to have a quiet couple of hours to work uninterrupted before emails and phone calls start rolling in. I'm not a fan of 5:00 a.m. myself, but all I'm really saying is, give it a shot. If it means work gets done faster and better, isn't it worth it? Maybe a little bit?