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Isn't drawing a cartoon character very different from drawing a scatterplot?

I'm not sure how the end conclusion about practice is relevant. I see how practicing would help in both drawing cartoon characters and drawing scatterplots. But I don't see the link between the two; it seems to me that practice would also help people who e.g. play an instrument.

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I think that you pretty much hit on the gist of the post. Professor needs to practice to draw cartoons, students need to practice to draw graphs, he shouldn’t be frustrated with students inability to draw graphs because they are at the beginning of their journey. Just as a cartoonist could possibly draw Bert and Ernie without any reference material compared to an amateur who can’t even when copying from a picture. A student can’t “draw” the scatter plot as well as a professor who has worked with the data for their whole career because they may be putting marks on the paper but they don’t necessarily “see” the data/ information. Certain data is going to have a certain form to it that may only be apparent to someone who works with it regularly so if asked to draw the data, you leave out details that are obvious to an expert such as making the made up data conform to the regression line or failing to include non-negative numbers. The exercise made the professor empathize with the students about being expected to do something trivial for the expert but difficult for the beginner.

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