King of Confusion

It is difficult to explain something complicated. Everyone probably has some kind of personal experience corroborating this. How can you take some piece of knowledge and move it from your brain into the brain of someone else? It may be so clear in your own head, something that you've understood for so long, that it is really difficult for you to remember what it is like to have no comprehension of the issues, concepts, ideas, whatever. This is essentially what makes teaching so difficult. Where am I going with this and how does the title relate to my point? Well, I had a meeting today with a Master's student I am supervising. He basically has all his data, but he just needs to analyze it. It is thus my job to guide him through the data analyses, i.e. statistics. Stats is the thorn in every grad student's side. Statistical analyses are rarely easy, often maddening, and always necessary. I'm no expert, but over the last few years I've learned enough to get by. My task was to transfer my understanding of the relevant statistics into this poor lad's head. The task was all the more difficult becausey I didn't know exactly how to deal with this data (yeah I'm a great supervisor I know). Essentially, I had to learn and/or invent some new approaches to analyze this data. I spent the whole afternoon/evening yesterday doing that in preparation for the meeting with the student this morning. When I experience some success in tackling a tough problem, I get excited because I feel like I'm approaching a satisfying solution, giving me a renewed sense of self-worth. This was the case yesterday afternoon. I got excited about learning these new methods and figuring out how to analyze this guy's data. My excitement carried over into the meeting this morning; I was eager to share my new ideas. And I definitely did. I regurgitated my freshly acquired knowledge all over this poor Master's student in a jumbled, disorganized, and generally incomprehensible manner...for nearly two hours. In some ways I did my job as supervisor. I spent a lot of time learning some new techniques and then shared this information with the student. Unfortunately, I did it in a very confusing manner (luckily I'm not giving lectures yet). So, for today, I am deeming myself the king of confusion...mostly because I confused someone other than myself for a change.