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.