Chi-Squareds, Cohen's Kappas, T-Tests and Academic Unfairness

I am in statistical hell: I am taking a research methods course in my graduate program. I'm burning and little evil chi-squared, alphas, kappas and t-tests are prickiling me with their tiny pointy numbery pitchforks. Since when does a marketing communication graduate student need an in-depth knowledge of correlation coefficients? What kind of poppycock is that?!!! You have computer programs for that!

Ok, I have always been no-so-good sucked at doing math and math problems. And now, due to existence of SPSS, Excel and other awesome tools my mathy part of the brain athrophied and fell off. It's an atavism,just like a tail our ancestors had once upon the evolution. Actually, I'll take a tail over the ability to do math.
That's it: I need a long, bendy, grabby tail so I can take my children in public and not worry about keeping tabs on them. Just imagine: you are at the grocery store, both hands full of squirming/screaming babies, and you calmly reach and grab what you need off of the nearest shelf. How cool would that be! And then you could push your grocery cart without having to let go of either of your children.

But anyway, back to my statistical suffering: I have an exam coming up and studying for it is like reading transcriptions of a coded speech. I recognize the individual words, but the meaning escapes me. And then what's up with academian speak?! The more courses I take, the more I realize that just because you are a brainy academian doesn't mean you can effectively relay your knowledge to others. The goal of the majority of my professors has been to use as many GRE test words as they can to make it as difficult as possible to understand them. I actually believe it is a requirement for teaching to weed out faint-hearted students and also to make sure that they don't get questions. If you can't understand the topic, you won't have questions about it.

Seriously in need of wine therapy after this week.

To end on the upbeat note as usual: no mention of poop for quite awhile :)