  Textbook data is essential for teaching statistics and data science methods
because they are clean, allowing the instructor to focus on methodology.
Ideally textbook data sets are refreshed regularly, especially when they are
subsets taken from an on-going data collection. It is also important to use
contemporary data for teaching, to imbue the sense that the methodology is
relevant today. This paper describes the trials and tribulations of refreshing
a textbook data set on wages, extracted from the National Longitudinal Survey
of Youth (NLSY79) in the early 1990s. The data is useful for teaching modeling
and exploratory analysis of longitudinal data. Subsets of NLSY79, including the
wages data, can be found in supplementary files from numerous textbooks and
research articles. The NLSY79 database has been continuously updated through to
2018, so new records are available. Here we describe our journey to refresh the
wages data, and document the process so that the data can be regularly updated
into the future. Our journey was difficult because the steps and decisions
taken to get from the raw data to the wages textbook subset have not been
clearly articulated. We have been diligent to provide a reproducible workflow
for others to follow, which also hopefully inspires more attempts at refreshing
data for teaching. Three new data sets and the code to produce them are
provided in the open source R package called `yowie`.
