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