Mean, Median, and Mode oh my!

I hate to admit that at age 27 I still mix these up, but I do.  For some reason these have always been a struggle for me.  I find that I have to have notes about them on hand to reference.  The benefit of doing exercises with these over and over this week is I am retaining the information.  Finally after years of doing math I started to automatically know what to do when asked for the mean.  I actually came up with some silly things to help me remember. 

While working on the mean of a problem I found myself saying “I mean average”.  Somehow this helped me to remember mean=average.  Once I made that connection I could easily find the “average”.

To remember median I just reminded myself that a median is in the center of the road.  Just like the median is the middle number, or average of the two middle numbers. 

For mode I just tried to say “mode most frequent” over and over until I remembered those words together.

Range was easiest for me because I trained myself to think the range in between is the smallest minus the largest number.

Another important thing I learned is not to get lazy and jump right in without order.  I always put the numbers in ascending order right away.  I found a website with some tips for remembering mean, median, and mode.  There is a cheesy little video with a song at the bottom to assist in remembering.  I think it would be helpful for younger children.  http://www.classbrain.com/artaskcb/publish/article_143.shtml

Working on these topics reminds me of why it is important to pay attention in math class.  There is a reason we learn things several times in our school careers.  I used to get frustrated at the repetitiveness and not pay attention.  Now I pay the price because I didn’t memorize many things my teachers were conditioning me on.

Overall this week wasn’t too difficult once I got the rhythm down.  I find graphing to be a bit easier for me, maybe because I am such a visual person.