I’m a statistical curmudgeon. When I teach statistics, I allow students to use only handheld calculators. I neither teach nor allow statistical software. I’m pretty sure I’m among the last of my kind. For context, I teach statistics to psychology majors as tools for research and analysis, not as a branch of mathematics. There are powerful statistical packages that can do what I teach my students more quickly and easily, but I eschew them all. I’ve taught statistics this way my whole 40-plus-year career. I’ve stayed the same, but the statistical packages I’ve avoided have changed. Long ago, Minitab and BMDP were the popular statistical packages, then came SPSS and Excel, and lately it has been JASP, Jamovi, and R. Don’t get me wrong. After statistics, students are required to take Research Methods, and I teach them how to use statistical software in that class, just not when they are learning statistics.
