First, I’m “officially” an old teacher. One of my former students is teaching in our building (French).
Second, I might start blogging for my students here — haven’t decided — or I might start a special blog for them.
I don’t think I have a big audience, but do you think it would be better to do a seperate blog or not?
Ran into a former student today. By the way, go back and say hello to your former teachers some time. Especially if they were helpful at all in your career. We LOVE hearing from former students.
He is on the reunion committee for the class of 1996 (yikes!), and had me when he was a freshman, so he must have learned Pascal on a DOS machine. Or maybe even one of the Commodore 64 kids. I should have asked.
The cool part is that he actually 4 years as a programmer for SouthWest airlines, coding in Java. Now that was one of my “dream jobs”, and I actually interviewed for SouthWest. He went to back to school to get a business degree and is working for a consulting firm.
He did say thank for you the programming class.
I enjoyed teaching it. As always, these students frustrated me. One finally pushed too many buttons today, I just got sick of him yelling at me. “Miss, I need to go to the restroom”. That sort of thing.
I had to do some creative grading. And I had a student fail out of each class, which was sad, but they didn’t do what they were told.
Would I do it again? Certainly if at my school and in my classroom. I sincerely doubt if I would do it somewhere else. The best thing, is that it kept people out of my room.
I honestly don’t want to teach without computers ever again. Yes, I will freely admit that I use them as babysitters for these kiddos and as rewards. But I also DO the majority of my teaching.
I truly believe that all students need instant feedback, and I can do that with the computers. I could do a better job of it if I taught more Algebra. As it is, everything has been temporary so far.
Now I can look forward to teaching technology full time.
And it is something that my last principal just couldn’t wrap her mind around. She was very insistant that everyone can learn everything.
Coding Horror: Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats
I’m also not sure I’d call them sheep or goats. Over my 14 years of teaching, lots of perfectly nice, normal children, many of them gifted and talented just couldn’t do learn how to program. What I usually tell their parents, is that not being able to program probably makes their child normal and that they have very little to worry about — and please don’t tell the parents of the programmers, but I’m quite sure that those of us who can probably have major screws loose. Hey, it makes them feel better.
I’m going off to read the article that prompted this post.
I just got some cool “feedback” from a student. She wanted to know how come I liked teaching math so much. My answer — I like teaching computer science better. Well, she’s been in my CS class and she says that I am just as enthusiastic no matter what subject I teach.
That’s COOL! Even though I really don’t like teaching math. However, I do like to see students learn no matter what subject.
Maybe someone lurking can help. We have a Novell server in my room, not sure which version we are running, but I think it is 5.1 or 5.2. I know enough about it to add users, set file permissions, and that’s about it.
Here’s the deal. I unraveled the network wiring, and the workstations stopped seeing the server. We get a “Tree or Server Not Found”. The same day I moved things around, the workstations stopped seeing it. And it made sense as for several hours I didn’t have the server connected to the network. Now here is the weird part, my notebook sees it fine.
The difference? Client level, the notebook had not been turned on since the move, and it has IPX configured as a protocol.
It’s driving me nuts, because I prefer giving my students exercises with Examview, and I’m forced right now to use HTML files. I’d appreaciate any answers as I doubt it will get solved until the week of the 17th, if then.
I’m pretty excited as I have all of the first six weeks written — I probably WILL tweak it and I have a good outline for the entire course, and an even better outline for the 2nd six weeks.
I really do think I’ll be able to have this knocked out by the time school starts. Even better, I’ll follow pretty much the same plans for my “face to face” class.
Baslically the first six weeks is “this is a computer and how it works”. The second six weeks explores Java and the Java platform, and the last six weeks is all programming input and output with primitives in various ways.
We do beginning objects and control structures the second semester.
Every time I make substantial extra money from the district — like my summer school money — I set aside a portion of it to do something fun and meaningful. In the past it’s been a computer specially set up to make my life easier, and once it was my file server. This year it is Macie, a beagle puppy, and I’ll be blogging about her at http://www.kweaver.org/macie
I think that doing something like this is good for recharging your batteries. In years past, the extra money has been for things like teaching an extra class which took a lot of energy. I also know that other people in my building do the same thing. One of my coworkers put a heater in her pool for example. It’s a tangible reward. For example, my principal even said in his summer school introduction, that he was using his summer school money to take his family to Disney (I think the Florida one) in the winter. I think that is really cool since the whole family is losing him for most of the day during the summer, and I think he usually spends a lot of his summer with them doing sports.
Well, sort of says it all.
I’ve now got 38 students in Algebra I Spring Semester which meets 1st period. I have 28 computers. So far we’re spending the majority of the class period working problems, off the overhead. I had them all log in today.
I’ve starting putting the lab back where it should be where this many kids can work. So far, I have 4 workstations on one wall, 4 work stations on the back wall, and 10 workstations on another wall. So my plan for tomorrow is to use the workstations as an overhead, putting 3 kids on each set of 2 workstations, working problems. I figure we’ll rotate about every 40 minutes or so, with two kids in front of computers, and the third in the back.
I had to kick one kid out today. He put his head down and did nothing. I had an A/C observing, so I had her take him down to the office with a note. He didn’t return.
I am actually hoping to lose 10 students, so that things will work right, but I’m not holding my breath.
Sad to feel that way, and sad that we seem to take all comers. My niece is in summer school and they limited the number of students who could sign up, she was on a waiting list and got in because someone didn’t show. We should do things that way.
Or hire another math teacher to teach Algebra.
But our biggest issue is no A/C.
I actually had fun with summer school today and am looking forward to tomorrow, but I’ve gone to bed twice now, laid down for two minutes and realized I didn’t feel comfortable about tomorrow.
I think I have everything done now — my Fall semester — which is 2nd period is set up on all the websites we’ll be using — AgileMind, Texas WebTutor, Examview and my website, though I need to get their grades together.
My Spring class just lacks having Examview set up but I can’t do that until tomorrow.
I’m thinking seriously of giving each kiddo an index card to write down all the passwords and logins — everyone is slightly different, and since I’m having them keep a folder anyway — or maybe I can just have them right it down on their folder. I should have enough sharpiers for them to pull that off.
First period is 23 students right now, and second period is 13. I think we can get more students tomorrow, obviously since there were students still waiting to get registered today when I left — and I just checked the district website, so I can figure on more students through Wednesday.
I also think I have enough to keep them occupied — though Spring semester is tough — we have a 2 hour and 40 minute class period and I’ve never had to keep students busy THAT long.
The biggest problem is trying to eliminate paper. Wednesday will be my first day of doing that. It will be interesting. It would be best if we had Adobe Acrobat (not reader on each computer, but I think I only have one copy). — no I double checked and since my lab is a Webmastering lab, we should have 29. I’ll have to get it installed. Of course, I can just have my students write the answers to their assignments on paper and not include the questions, which are on the computer.
Most can’t type and are not very computer literate in English — though some are more comfortable in Spanish, but no I am not allowing to them switch interfact languages, because the math test is in ENGLISH!
One thing I am also working hard on with them is vocabulary. They weren’t sure what a meteriologist was today.
All in all, I’m excited. Yeah, I need to get some sleep!