Week 12 Retrospective
What went well:
Making problems for final homework is pretty fun. Spent Monday doing a lot of that, looking for problems, and solving them. It was a bit like doing (easy) interview practice/ problems in the process. I ended up making about 15 homework assignments that are basically interview questions. I’m a bit unsure about difficulty though; am I expecting too much? Maybe. I spent the majority of Tuesday grinding through them, writing unit tests and putting them on Mimir. I got really tired after a day of making them; I’m just really not a big Mimir fan and doing all those write-ups was really tiring. I wrote a script to change the write-ups with the function I was going for though, so at least that greatly sped up the process. I’m again really glad that I grinded before GIR started making materials; I can’t imagine needing to make slides and homework with everything else going on.
I postponed quizzes because we hadn’t finished complexity, and I also realized students didn’t really know how or when to use sets. Many of them avoid using a set and then just O(n²) iterate through two for loops instead of using a set. I think it might be conceptually difficult, not sure. Also, I realized a lot of my homework problems maybe don’t really require a set, even though it’s more efficient.
I sent out the form to students asking what they’d like me to do during Decembermester, and all the students who answered (all five of them, currently) seems like students they’re interested in learning to build apps. I also sent out form to other GIRs, but I don’t really expect much traction from that as evident from my tech series. I thought it’d be pretty cool for students across schools to work on a project together, but that might be thinking too idealistically.
Along with the form, I was thinking about how and why I have so much time to do “extra” things, notably Tech Series and Decembermester. For the former, I think I’m just good and fast at organizing events because that’s something I’ve done forever and know how to do. It’s probably thanks to front-loading a lot of my work to before the semester, which I still think is pretty awesome. For Decembermester, well, I guess I’m not going to be teaching anymore so I have time.
I came up with the idea of asking one of my colleagues to do a live tech series! Yay.
I helped a student debug this week, and he has been consistently asking me questions on Discord which is great. When we debugged, I was blown away by how quickly he could debug, and he could debug abstractly. He wrote code and could tell why it wouldn’t work without using an example! That was really cool. He’s also the first one to always start my assignments and tell me there’s an error (if there are any).
I think the number of errors I’ve been making for assignments has gone down, which is good. I annoy myself with those errors, and I just feel bad for the students every time that happens.
As the semester is winding down, I have a lot less work to do. It’s great. Or maybe it’s because I postponed quizzes so I didn’t have to make those this week. The only work I have left is maybe make the last question for homework this week, make the exam, quiz 8 retake, and quiz 9.
I also came up with the idea of teaching version control this week and made slides for that. It was pretty fun to make slides for that.
Keeping track of what happens throughout the week is really much better than trying to come up with all this at the end of the week. I should’ve started this earlier, oops.
What could be improved:
Complexity is hard to teach, I just talked at students for an hour on Monday and Wednesday. There also might be a gap between counting operations and orders of growth? I’m not sure. It’s also a lot of information that they’ll probably get later, and I found myself teaching how data structures work underneath the surface which is cool but might be too much for an introductory course. We’ll see how the quiz goes I guess.
I feel like in the past two days, I’ve had to explain why and how teaching is a lot of work. I understand the lack of perspective and experience from people not understanding, but it’s still kind of annoying. My best friend’s boyfriend has apparently also been telling other people that my best friend has a friend (me) who’s teaching and getting paid a SWE salary. That’s really annoying, it sounds like he doesn’t understand how much work I or teachers do and how involved it is. One of my close friends also kept asking how it’s a lot of work, but after I explained exactly what I need to do, he understood.
I realized maybe I should’ve emphasized more on how to debug throughout course. I definitely show students who come to office hours how to debug and they’ve made improvements, but for students who don’t, I’m hoping by watching me step through code, they get it. Or maybe we should’ve done more “what’s the bug in this code” problems as warm-up / review.
One of my students struggles with reading and comprehending directions, and I don’t know how to solve this problem. I provide example unit tests as well, so looking at that along with the problem statement should help. It’s really frustrating because I don’t know what else I can do. Other students understand my directions, so I don’t understand why there’s such a big gap here. This student has consistently taken up a lot of my time throughout the semester by coming to office hours and turns out isn’t even a computer science major. I just hope all this effort hasn’t gone down the drain, but I respect hard work so there’s that.
Two of my students who have worked together before in the past turned in code that’s basically exactly the same for two assignments (although I realized that those two homework problems are basically solved the same way). The code is not the most efficient, and no other students did it that way. I sent emails to both asking if they worked with others and they both said no. One said he doesn’t understand why he keeps getting asked this question, and I sent him the screenshots of the code saying that’s why. Ugh.
