Statistics have never been our thing. They're so easily skewed and, thus, are so rarely straight. But, they're especially bent in Carnegie Mellon professor Michele DiPietro's gay statistics class.

The openly gay teacher turned heads when he introduced the class, which, he says, he hopes puts a human - not to mention timely - face on the often perplexing subject.

As a gay man, I already had a lot of knowledge [of studies] that were being done in the U.S. on gays. So, I tried to come up with a class on that. I was inspired to kind of take my own challenge and make my own classes as diverse as possible.

It can tell us more things about societal issues.

Certainly an interesting concept, but one can't help but wonder whether it will have the desired impact. Consider student Ellen Parkhurst's comments:

The statistics [were] very interesting, because I was able to read academic papers regarding the topic of homosexuality.

Because there are gay people, black people, Jewish people, disabled people, etc., there needs to be a way for students to learn about these populations so they can gauge how they will respond when they meet someone of a different background.

Or you could just treat everyone equally, regardless of their place on a pie chart. That would be better. And that's a fact, Jack (said fact not statistically sound).

Professor integrates gay culture into statistics course [Daily Free Press]