Video construction

A well known online education company is holding a video competition for creation of education videos. Initially I didn't think it was really worth the effort to enter, but I have reconsidered - it would be a good exercise of my skills, a good opportunity to improve and learn a lot about information format.

I have made videos before - my last one was notably an origami tutorial that got ok feedback from other people. But I watched the video again, and I realised there is so, so much room to improve. I'm not the same person that I was before. I don't have a lid on my heart anymore (did I ever have one?) - I'm so much better at getting criticised. Being criticised is the fastest way to the top, and I won't be fully satisfied unless I am battling it out with the very best at the very peak of the mountain. Or the tree, in this case. I'm meant to be a tree climber?

Protactinium: Planning, Week 10

Only three more weeks after this one! It looks like we're nearing the end of my career as a university TA. After this, I'm gonna go start working in industry, and I think I'll have less opportunities to teach.

- Offer to have a prac exam setting in the tutorial, followed by solution to the prac exam
- Cover linked lists
- If I have time later, fix my website with linked list examples
- Walk around and discuss Assignment 3 with the other students
- Revise the concept of linked lists and give an example of a linked list practical exam
- Tell people to start preparing their resumes and final portfolios and catching up work - the end is coming up. make it positive - you'll have a lot of fun finishing up the course. you've learned a lot over the course, make sure you go out with a bang and finish up well!
- Offer a sample resume review from last year and resume feedback
- Blog highlights encourage blogging

Protactinium: Review, Week 7

One week skipped because of not enough time. Interviewing for jobs is particularly time-consuming. Recently I've had less and less energy. I'll probably stop blogging at the end of the semester - I don't think there's much more tutoring for me to do.

General thoughts:
- Students are paying less attention in class recently. I'm not sure what I need to do. I feel like I have tried many strategies - I have tried to get them to have group exercises and discussions (but they're really not inclined to offer feedback), I have tried code reviews (but they're really not efficient in terms of time and do not promote discussion), and I have tried interesting examples (which I suppose work better. I guess I need to focus on making sure the content is advanced enough to be engaging, which requires a tonne of prep.

It's not as if they're going off and doing other things - they're being friendly with each other as a class, which is really great. If only I could somehow channel that friendly energy into learning energy...

Icecold: Review, week 5

This week was dominated by the superbly challenging prime factorisation problem, which basically all students at least attempted.

Tutorial:
- In the tutorial, I chose to focus my examples on teaching skills to solve the first three (easier) exercises, and just ignore the prime factorisation exercise for now. I believe this was a mistake - we got through the examples in barely half an hour, and for a brief moment I wasn't sure how to continue.

Inter-tutorial tasks

One thing that I've been doing badly across the first half of the semester is keeping myself accessible between tutorials to the students as a source of assistance.

I've noticed that I haven't been getting as many email questions from the students as I would have liked. I believe this is because I am not available enough to my students - I do not exist strongly enough as a presence in the student's mind. I am making the mistake that I so easily observed in other tutors.

Protactinium: Review, week 5

Lately I have been getting worse and worse at reflecting on time. And I've paid the price. The valuable memories, the memories I should have been reflecting on, they've disappeared from my mind one by one like temporal butterflies.

These experiences are so very valuable - you only get two a week, and it's not like you can just click "Play again" if you screw up.

Start with dot points. Always start with dot points. Even if you forget, the dot points will be your valuable link to the past event that you've so easily forgotten.

Protactinium: Review, week 4

This week was alright. Neither good, nor bad. Now that I've established the main features of my tutorial, I generally have less things to say.

Tutorial
- Lately our class has become a lot more lively and it is a bit more difficult to maintain students' attention during classes. I will have to make my teachings especially engaging to deal with this.

Lab
- I failed to select a pair for the code review next week. This means that next week I will have to improvise some content to cover in the extra 20 minutes. Since I will be standing up the front for an extra 20 minutes, I will make sure to make the content extra engaging so that the students will be able to pay attention easily.

Compass: Update

I'm currently in the process of delegating Compass to different volunteer presenters, so that they can come up with content for each week. It's useful because I don't have all that much time to do everything.

Which means my duties are reduced to mostly talking to other presenters and overseeing the workshops and checking out how everything is going. I have noted a list of things I often say to demonstrators and presenters in and outside of the workshops.

Protactinium: Planning, week 4

Contextual information:
- Assignment is due in 3 days
- Time management portfolio due and 14 (most) people have done it
-  First year CSE camp just finished. idk if people went

tute:
- Link microprocessors to real content - nonverbal, pictures, etc.
- Cool demonstrations
- Explicitly mention pair programming
- Breaking down abstract problems realistic example from work (interview questions)
- Talk about code reviews
- Prepare people for the assignment
- functions and pointers activity

lab:
- select pair for code review

Protactinium: Review, week 3

The tutorial and lab were mostly successful, I think, with few problems encountered. I feel like the main drive of my tutorials and labs (trying to hit everyone with generic, general teaching) has been largely unproblematic. In the next few weeks, however, I will need to start targeting specific people and identifying more specific problems.

The general approach is designed with average person in mind, and will be found ineffective when approaching outliers (specifically, people who are struggling more than the others). It will also be ineffective at engaging especially strong students, but at least they're keeping up with the work.

Self-improvement

Today I posted on a Facebook page giving advice for another tutor. Here was part of the response:

"re 1: this is something I make a huge effort towards. I never dismiss anything as a stupid question, I always ask if anyone has questions about anything and spend a lot of time getting class discussions going on whatever people want to talk about. I'm a master at the whole "yes but" rather than "no" thing. I'm supposedly pretty good at all of the above, since I do have a history of a lot of great, balanced class discussions with everyone contributing and nobody being left out, and even my other class is fine with this, so I don't think it's that specifically; or maybe it's something where if I have a majority of students who are something then the class discussions manage to build off that, so maybe having a less something class is causing it to snowball?"

I suppose this is why ordinary people have trouble achieving grandmastery.

When I read things like this, I am reminded of how much I was changed by my losses in Starcraft (http://roadtograndmaster.blogspot.com.au/2015/03/welcome-to-teaching-tree.html).

Most people choose not to look upwards, for it reminds them of how low they are on the mountain. Most prefer to stay where they are.

It is good that they are happy with that, but I can't help feeling like the students deserve better.

Protactinium: Planning, week 3

Tutorial:
- eth0 programming competition: Cool stuff you can do in programming (may be too distant - out of their scope)
-  Discussion about resume

- Class rep
- Ampersand trick
- Age advisor from icecold: dating range n/2 + 7
- Demonstration of failing at coding and debugging; joke about being unemployed
- Code review: confusing style activity
- If, nested if
- Functions

Lab:
- Pick code review: explore memory

Icecold: review, week 1

The overall feeling from the first class was not a great one. But we'll see what we can do about this in the next few weeks.

The planning section is a great memory aid and reflection tool, because I can compare what I was thinking before the class to what I was thinking after the class. Let's bring it up.

Lecture discussion 1

At the very heart of self-improvement is watching others. Watching skilled people, watching unskilled people, watching yourself. Analysing other people, analysing yourself and reflecting on what makes someone skillful.

I am not merely a teacher, I am also a learner, and I think this semester I will find it useful to take notes on the lecturers and their lecturing styles. Not only can I improve my own teaching, but it will help me pay attention in lectures. If I am focusing on what the lecturer is saying, it is easy to absorb required information.

Compass: Planning, week 1

Alright, so remember how I had barely 1.5 hours to plan for protactinium the night before, plus about a shaky hour on the train the morning?

Well, my total planning time for compass is about 40 minutes. I wish myself luck.

Different course, same planning strategy. Here we go.

Audience: est. 15-20 high school students
Resources: Example files and ideas from previous iterations of the workshop. 4 helpers. My own skills and abilities.

It will not be enough - not this time. But maybe next time, or the time after that. Or the time after that.

Protactinium: Review, week 2

So this time I got some time to do my review directly after the tutorial. This kind of review is the best kind of review.


Tutorial plan was executed exceedingly well (i.e. many times better than any other tutorials I've had). I think this is partially due to my increased experience, and partially due to the fact that this tutorial has some fairly enthusiastic students who responded well.

That doesn't mean crap, though. I've still got so far to go, so far to towards grandmastery.

Icecold: Planning, week 1

One hour and 20 minutes is the time I have. With my new planning methods, it should be more than enough.

This is a slightly different course from protactinium, but there are a lot of activities and content that I can try to reuse.

struggling to find a cool example of a demonstration I could use.

Scheduling

Ideally I'd like to get at least 5 hours of planning in for my first tutorial, in order to make the greatest impact. I suppose this is completely infeasible, however. If I add on the three hours of actual tutorial, and the three hours of travel time, I'm left with barely any time to do anything at all.

Protactinium: Planning, week 2

So I have discovered that it is a common occurrence to end up having not enough time to prepare for the tutorials. However, review time is a bit easier to acquire, since I can just review the tutorial at university, directly after the tutorial has been completed.

I have come up with a more efficient strategy for tutorial planning: I will simply note down dot points of my plan without writing down my justifications, then I will explain them in further depth in the review. Writing down takes time, and I can think much faster than I type (150wpm).

Icecold: Pre-course discussion

Soon the lecturer + TA meeting for icecold is coming up, and it's time to start thinking about how I will prepare my classes.

Protactinium: Review, week 1

So I didn't end up writing the review on the same day, as I had planned. On the bright side, I was able to take notes during the tutorial, so there is a lot that I can reference.

Some of my notes don't make sense to me, because I took them quickly. I should reread the notes directly after the tutorial, to keep my memory of them active.

Protactinium: Planning, Week 1

Here we go for our first planning session for 2015! The tutorial was basically sprung on me with little prior time to figure things out, so I have a bit less than an hour to prepare my first tutorial for Protactinium. It is time that I am sorely lacking, but I am already sleep-deprived, and getting more sleep will be the most valuable thing for my didactic effectiveness.

My time is so very valuable.

Semester Plans

I have some commitments I have prepared for the semester. These will be important to actively improve on my teaching abilities, which is an important factor in improvement.

- Write a post on this blog discussing lesson plans, before each teaching session. I am hoping to be able to have a fairly solid discussion on each tutorial, but that will be difficult to do when I am short on time.
- Write a post on this blog reflecting on each tutorial, immediately after I finish it. The 'immediately' is extremely important. Things that happened during the tutorial are easily forgotten, and my memory will be the most fresh directly after I do the tutorial. I'm hoping to be able to do a tutoring reflection at the very least on the same day.
- Consistently reflect on my teaching abilities, things I need to improve on and practice (e.g. body language, volume of voice, clarity of diagrams, resources required, interesting-ness of class)
- Follow academic journals on education and keep up with the latest research on teaching insights
- Always be on the lookout for new ways to improve my teaching abilities, in addition to the above.

Welcome to the Teaching Tree

About half a year ago, I qualified for the Grandmaster League in the multiplayer real-time strategy game Starcraft II. It means you're one of the best players in your region. It was an achievement that I'm still proud of - hours upon hours of practice every day, training every combination of keys imaginable, watching my replays, optimising my keyboard shortcuts, doing the same things over and over again until my wrists were sore...