Campus Celebrity: Professor Ellen Fireman

Professor Ellen Fireman teaches more than 1,700 University of Illinois students every year about what she knows best: Statistics. For 20 years, Professor Fireman’s contributions to the U of I community have been immeasurable. Not only is she an outstanding teacher, but her creative teaching style and exuberant presence inspire students to learn. Professor Fireman shares with Her Campus about her life and experiences as a statistics expert.
 
HC: Why did you decide to become a statistics professor?
 I’ve always been drawn to logic and I’ve always loved teaching, but believe it or not, I never planned to become a statistics professor. I didn’t even major in math in college! It’s a long story, and a very long job history (I even drove an 18 wheeler for a week!), but the truth is, it wasn’t until I hit 40 and starting teaching math and stats at the U of I that I found my true calling. So my message to students is this: Don’t worry about finding a career right away; explore your options, be patient and try to find the job that’s meant for you — one that let’s you be your best self, that turns your weaknesses into strengths and that lets you make a difference in this world. That’s what teaching is to me, particularly teaching Stat 100, my all time favorite course!
 

HC: How did you end up at the University of Illinois?
 I ended up at the University of Illinois because my husband, Michael Weissman, got a job teaching Physics here. We met as students at Harvard, where I majored in philosophy.
Looking back, it was a pretty useless major. I chose it because I thought it would be fun and easy for me—I imagined philosophers as “reason doctors” examining the logical health of various disciplines, checking for tangled thoughts and missing arguments. It’s funny because you could say the same thing about statisticians — but I think they’ve developed a better set of tools to help people reason effectively.
 
HC: What is the best part about teaching?
 I absolutely love teaching Stat 100. It’s by far my favorite teaching experience. So many students come in with a negative attitude towards math, particularly statistics and it’s my mission to turn them around. Everyone’s favorite quote is, “There’s lies, damn lies and statistics.” Of course you can lie with statistics, you can lie even more easily with words, but that doesn’t stop us from using them. We don’t go around grunting like other animals, because we have confidence in ourselves when it come to words; we know how to read words and we know how to read faces, (although careful statistical studies indicate that we’re not nearly as good at it as we think we are), but most of us are clueless when it comes to numbers. Our eyes glaze over and we ignore statistics or even worse, we hate them, because they make us feel powerless and inadequate. All the important decisions these days involve data, and statistics is to data what grammar is to language. It’s necessary for understanding, but only interesting if used to understand something you care about.
 
HC: How would you describe your teaching style?
 I try to make concepts as vivid as possible by using interesting examples and surprising analogies. I love to connect new ideas to common sense, especially if the new ideas are either very similar to, or very opposite from common sense. But probably what influences my teaching the most is I’m acutely aware of how boring it gets to passively sit listening to someone else lecture for an hour and a half, no matter how interesting the topic may be. So I try to involve the class as much as possible and use the large class size to enact statistical ideas. Also everyone appreciates some spontaneity during lectures, so I try to give examples and tell stories that are statistically relevant but just happen to arise because something unexpected happens.
 
HC: What has been one of the your most memorable moments as a professor?
 The strangest experience happened years ago when I was teaching Statistics in 66
Library. I was doing a long calculation on the blackboard and I said to the class, “Follow me and tell me if I make any mistakes.” Two weeks later, a student came up to me after class and said, “I’ve been doing what you asked. I’ve been following you. Every day after class I follow you all the way up Wright St. You either go for coffee or lunch.” I said, “Huh?” She said, “I can only follow you for an hour because after that I have to go to class.” There was a long awkward pause and then she said, “ So do you really want to know your mistakes?” An even longer awkward pause…and I said, “OK”Well, she said, “you talk to yourself… out loud …and with your hands, you know people might think you’re crazy.”

And I knew she was right, because after every class I think of something I left out or should have explained better and I get worked up about it, trying to remind myself to do better next time. Then she said, “Do I get extra credit for all the work I put in?” Ever since then I wonder how many other students have completely misinterpreted me and believe I’ve said equally outrageous things.
 
HC: What advice would you give someone entering this field?
 You have to feel passionate about teaching or it becomes it’s an enormous amount of work.
 
HC: When you aren’t teaching, what kinds of activities do you enjoy?
 I love almost any type of physical exercise — jogging, swimming, biking, dancing and even stretching. And I’m crazy about the ocean; that’s the only thing I don’t like about the Midwest — no ocean.