Productivity development practises talk

I seem to have a habit of picking up new projects without properly finishing reviews of old ones. It feels kind of wrong but it's the only way I can collect enough motivation.

The upcoming audience is unlike any one that I would have encountered before. This time, I'm presenting to people even more experienced than I am on my particular topic, so the major challenge in this case is developing content which is interesting/engaging enough for them to pay attention. Developing content which is out of the scope of their knowledge.

I have 10-15 minutes. Can I really teach people years more experienced and twice as skilled as I am? I don't really know. But it's worth a try, right?

Students: catching up

Catching up with incomplete work is important to the overall progress of every class. Using a metric of "average performance of the class", or "average learning of the class", the students who are behind are probably the most important ones, as they will perform the least well across the course.

It's a supremely important concept for the teacher to consider, because students who are behind receive a lot of negative reinforcement from classes. They notice that they don't understand concepts that their fellow students find easy, their classmates are discussing material from class they've never heard of, and it makes them feel excluded and hopeless.

Farewell university TAing

Oh yeah, an update on where I'm at now.

I moved across the world from Sydney to San Francisco and now I'm working here as a software engineer. But I still haven't given up on being the best teacher in the world, and I want to see what I can achieve with my spare time.

I think I'll pick up a few teaching projects.
- private tutoring
- solo compass v2 in collaboration with high schools
- youtube channel
- educational webapp ideas (I know, it's clichéd. But my webapp will be magical.
- educational mini-lectures at my new company

I still haven't given up. I owe myself that much.

Private tutoring practice - coding interviews!

- I think private tutoring is about picking the correct exercises and stringing them together efficiently into lessons. Coming up with the right exercises is really hard, though. It requires a crap ton of 'creativity' (aka. failing and trying again) to come up with an exercise that feels correct. It takes even more to come up with an exercise that feels 'magical'.

I can't really explain the feeling of magic that comes with creating a really good exercise. Some exercise ideas just have this weird exciting feeling to them. Sometimes you can practically taste the excitement of the students, that's how good the exercise is.

Video construction ideas

I wasn't able to finish the videos to be submitted on time. Not really surprising, and may have been for the best, since I was on point for leaving the country.

I'll write down some ideas I had for the videos, and maybe they'll come in useful later.

Origami video:
- Intro with title. Pictures of To the Moon game. Small clips of failed rabbit and chucking away the model multiple times to make people feel better about the fact that they have to retry it
- Show paper and explain choice of having paper which is differently coloured on both sides
- ...
- Conclusion - Ask for feedback and things to improve on, and what videos they want to see. Don't bother subscribing

Time complexity video: Binary search on an intuitive level and gloss over logarithmic complexity (but mention it briefly)
- Context: Programs are fast in modern times but still lag, and we need to make them faster
- Demonstration of how a program takes longer with larger numbers
- Normally it doesn't matter: demonstrate multiplication
- Binary search on an intuitive level. Gloss over the logarithmic complexity but don't really mention it.
- Challenge: exponentiation: how do we find a**n in less multiplications?

Intermediate level Python workshop - part 3

Coming up with workshops is damned hard. I would say that I'm a fairly experienced presenter, but I actually feel rather pressured by the idea of having to present a completely new workshop tomorrow. I feel like I'm going to be underprepared and I'm going to screw something up in a way I'm going to regret.

I'm going to make a list of all the ideas websites I encounter and that way I'll feel a lot better when I eventually pick some of them for my exercises for the workshop.

Intermediate level Python workshop - part 2

In our planning from the previous post, we've established three major areas of learning that we can pick and choose from. The next step is to establish basic core exercises for each of our three topics, and write down the pre-requisite knowledge for each exercise (NEVER underestimate pre-requisite knowledge!) This will also help us design the revision part at the start of the workshop.

I think coming up with good exercises is the most creative and difficult part of designing and workshop. I'm not looking forward to considering and chucking away hundreds of ideas because they have some essential flaw. We'll see what we can do though.

Intermediate level Python workshop.

I've got 7 days until the workshop. Man, I thought I could put a fair bit of time in and get some decent quality out of this workshop.

I have the feeling that this happens to teachers everywhere from all around the world.

 Basically, I'm part of the volunteer student organization (the same one from compass, right?), and I volunteered for one last workshop. Kind of a throwback to the old days. I kind of want to teach a final workshop, a really polished one, just to prove to myself that my teaching skills have progressed. Is that kind of selfish? I don't know. But I do want to make this workshop better than the ones I've taught before.

This is the workshop description:

Python can draw graphs, send emails, and even visit web pages for you! Learn to use Python to its fullest capacity.

I came up with this workshop idea to replace a crappy previous workshop idea (teach unix tools and regex to high school students? you've got to be joking). Let's see what we can make out of this!