Find min, max, and average of a list

from __future__ import division

somelist =  [1,12,2,53,23,6,17] 
max_value = max(somelist)
min_value = min(somelist)
avg_value = 0 if len(somelist) == 0 else sum(somelist)/len(somelist)

If you want to manually find the minimum as a function:

somelist =  [1,12,2,53,23,6,17] 

def my_min_function(somelist):
    min_value = None
    for value in somelist:
        if not min_value:
            min_value = value
        elif value < min_value:
            min_value = value
    return min_value

Python 3.4 introduced the statistics package, which provides mean and additional stats:

from statistics import mean, median

somelist =  [1,12,2,53,23,6,17]
avg_value = mean(somelist)
median_value = median(somelist)

Return min and max value in tuple:

def side_values(num_list):
    results_list = sorted(num_list)
    return results_list[0], results_list[-1]


somelist = side_values([1,12,2,53,23,6,17])
print(somelist)

Only a teacher would ask you to do something silly like this. You could provide an expected answer. Or a unique solution, while the rest of the class will be (yawn) the same...

from operator import lt, gt
def ultimate (l,op,c=1,u=0):
    try:
        if op(l[c],l[u]): 
            u = c
        c += 1
        return ultimate(l,op,c,u)
    except IndexError:
        return l[u]
def minimum (l):
    return ultimate(l,lt)
def maximum (l):
    return ultimate(l,gt)

The solution is simple. Use this to set yourself apart from obvious choices.