The first class on Statistics

I find myself on a Sunday morning working to prepare what will be my first class on Statistics for a new course. While I try to imagine ideas and a broad picture of the class I check the stream at Google+ and listen to TED talks on language and speech. Without realizing it my brain begin to put the ideas together and find patterns just as working on Mathematics ill do, and because Mathematics is, after all, a language.
We live in the age of information, communicating and manipulating bits of knowledge. Data can be thought of as a piece of a picture around us; a picture of a story represented by numbers, and therefore, a picture of a story waiting to be told. Statistics is a science that deals with data, but I prefer to define it as a way of describing, understanding and telling the story hidden among the fragmented pieces of data we collect in a myriad of ways. Good statistics explains clearly the links between data, and good statistics often generates interesting questions that further the quest for knowledge. A quote from Sherlock Holmes' The Adventure of the Copper Beeches comes to mind: "Data!Data!Data!" he cried impatiently, "I can't make bricks without clay". And so it is that data gives us the clay with which we form bricks and construct a picture, a landscape, a story.
The building of our story in Statistics begins with context. We must first identify the group of individuals or objects that the data will represent. We call that context "Population" and we begin to ask questions such as "How many individuals or objects are there in that population?" and that number is the purpose of my first class, the number N. What is N? How do we find it? Does it ever change? How does it change? How quickly doe sit change?
Human beings are social learners and story telling (and language) is part of our genetic map. Storytelling is behind Statistics, and, not surprisingly, Storytelling is also behind a good class...
Or so I hope.