Introductory statistics courses are taken each year by hundreds of thousands of students across the country. These students come from many fields: the life sciences, humanities, education, agriculture, business, but above all from the social sciences. They rarely take statistics voluntarily. They sign up for the course because of departmental or graduation requirements. The great majority has minimal preparation in mathematics, rarely more than they bring along from high school. They carry over into statistics their prejudices of mathematics and quite often, justifiably so. Teachers of statistics courses should then ask themselves how they can make the introductory statistics course statistically meaningful and not simply an exercise in mathematics or, what may even be worse, a meaningless compendium of statistical techniques.