Week 4 Retrospective

I’m starting to feel a bit fatigued from doing all this. It’s also starting to feel slightly repetitive.

What went well:

Through debugging with my students last week, I realized a way to explain while loops that I didn’t do before, and that’s asking three questions: 1) Does anything need to repeated and if so, what? 2) What is / are the condition(s) for which that needs to be repeated (or conversely, what’s the condition to stop repeating and flip that) and 3) What are we changing each time in the loop? I think that really helped students understand and write while loops, and I’m pretty happy about that!

I’m also perfectly okay with slowing down and re-explaining concepts. I like that — being flexible to change.

I came to the realization that I can ask my TA’s to take my quizzes (and exam) before I give it to my students because apparently I continue being not great at determining how long a quiz can be. Or maybe they are too difficult, I’m not sure.

I completely finished Mimir’ing Blackjack, the rest. Part 3 is due tonight and I have parts 4–6 prepared on Mimir. That is such a relief, and I can start prepping for the next project which I’ll need to do completely from scratch. I do feel quite confident that I’ll be able to do that one much faster because I figured out the testing situation.

Another good is I reached out to students who are not doing too well to ask if they’d like to look over homework 1:1. I had a group of three on Friday afternoon as a result, and at first it was a bit rough because I didn’t really know how to help all three at once, but I think it ended up being alright. Some other students are coming to office hours tomorrow to get some help. That’s good.

What can be improved:

My quiz was too long again. I thought it was fine! I asked a friend afterward and he said he thought it was fine too. Sigh. At least from here on out, I know how to fix this issue, or at least try to fix it so I’m not randomly guessing at how much they’ll be able to finish. When I was grading this quiz, I had a sinking feeling since the beginning because one of my top students is at the top of the Mimir list and he didn’t turn in code for the last question. I knew from that it was going to be a bad quiz. Oops.

Finding cheaters for the project and then feeling slightly bullied afterward. Not a great two days, that’s for sure.

I felt really busy in the first part of the week but once Tuesday passed, I felt a lot better. I think it’s probably because at the beginning of the week, I always feel like there’s a lot to do, but after I prepare for the week, it become significantly less.

One of the students I wrote about found my blog. I’m not sure what to think about that, and I’m actually not sure how he even found it.