Doing It The Hard Way

I'm taking a statistics class for my master's degree. It is hard. It is especially hard for me because I tend to do it the hard way. CoolGuy pointed out tonight that I'm having a little war with my calculator because I'm using it the way I use the computer. Meaning: I wait until I absolutely, positively need something done (the correct way) and then I try to use the tool, but discover that I don't know how to do it because I've never sat down and learned how to use the tool. True, I do that. I've been struggling with the calculator in exactly that way, too. Tonight in class, a fellow student had to show me how to decipher my screen so that I could find the square root of a number. (It was a big, elaborate number, with a decimal...in my defense.) But, my eyes had not seen the parenthesis mark at the beginning of the number there under the square root sign, so I had not learned how to add the final parenthesis and make my calculator understand what I wanted it to do. It kept displaying Syntax Error and making me crazy!!! Oh. I see. Sigh....

I met with my professor this afternoon (taking off a half day of work in order to do so, which involves lesson plans, etc. etc. I'm just saying that nothing about this class is making my life more simple.) But, it's good that I did because one simple thing she showed me will make a huge difference. I asked if it should take almost an hour to calculate the standard deviation for a set of data she had given us and she said to show her how I was doing it. Well, turns out the formula I was using was wrong. Oh, it would get me to the standard deviation, but it was an elaborate, twisted way to do so. Here's my analogy:

Say I wanted to eat quesadillas for supper. My way (using the wrong formula) was the equivalent of going out and milking the cow, bringing in the milk, making the cheese, and grating it with a fork onto the tortillas. Her formula showed me how to just go buy grated cheese. Yeah.