The moving house thingie went well, love the new quiet location. This being Ireland, of course, I still don't have Internets... Ah well. As of 2 hours ago I am now the proud and confused owner of a pair of glasses, trying out the world with anti-aliasing on. It's weird! I actually still can't really read from far away but everything feels a lot sharper.
Finished the 'Introduction to programming using Python' course last week. Students' overall feedback is positive but I still have a lot of thinking to do about this. I'm craving book references that would give me more solid approaches and understanding on how to teach effectively, because even when knowing the topic perfectly well I'm not sure that "just doing it" is quite enough.
Hi Julie, I checked back to see how you were getting on with the teaching... I didn't realize it was that short a course. I've never heard of any books on teaching to program; I presume there are books on learning to teach (for those training as schoolteachers) but it seems that what school teaching there is about computing is done by teachers borrowed (or press-ganged) from other subjects.
And the kind of teaching that you've written about is different from the school kind anyway, as you're with a much smaller group, which is a different kind of interaction, a more personal one and therefore one which depends more on the teacher's personality. So even if there were books on it, they couldn't be a complete "how-to": you would still need "just doing it" because that is really the way to learn a skill. I think you've got the right attitude to learning, always wanting to improve, so you're well-placed to learn from your experience.
There's a lot to be said for a quiet location without the Internet! I find it's a good way of getting a block of work done. Sometimes I wish that remote locations like lighthouses were rentable e.g. for geeks / poets!
Hope your eyes and brain recalibrate to the glasses soon. I replaced mine a few weeks ago, and felt a bit headachy at first; but things like that pass quite quickly. #1. Posted by John Sturdy on Wed 07 Apr 2010, 13:48
It's books or courses on learning how to teach or just "Teaching" in general that I would be interested in. There are many things I get stuck on at times, like finding metaphors, saying the same thing differently, what's known to work as an exercises-to-lecturing ratio, strategies to set the pace of a class and overall course, and I don't know... I want to know what people who teach and think a lot about teaching have gathered about their discipline! I feel that I'm missing important foundations that I should be building upon, even though I expect that there will be a lot of just-figuring-things-out-as-I-go to be done anyway.
Thank you for the encouragement in any case! I might be teaching to larger classes later this year so I definitely need to adapt :) #2. Posted by jpichon (Website) on Fri 09 Apr 2010, 19:05