The second task for the Teaching webcraft course is about making up profiles for people we're hoping to help. The couple of biographies that follow do not cover it all, but should still be a fair sample :-)

* * *

Jessie is a high school student, and although she thinks about it often, what she wants to do after her final year still very much depends on what catches her interest the most any given week. She navigates the web effortlessly, and hangs out online in all the social networks her friends are into. She never really considered programming as something she could learn, but when presented with the opportunity to join an intro course she thinks maybe there she'll learn enough code to be able to personalise her blog, and make it look unique and more interactive.

This course will teach Jessie how to create her first program, and that programming is more similar to puzzle solving than inputting number in Excel to do sums like in the ICT class. Perhaps something worth exploring further...

*

Jon is working hard at his PhD thesis in social sciences. He has a lot of statistics to parse and go through every day, results of experiments to reproduce before building on them and so on. He has a dozen of Excel spreadsheets set up with insane macros that save him a lot of time, but still wastes many hours manually inputting data taken from websites or articles. He's hoping learning to program will enable him to spend less time on drudge work and more time exploring the interesting questions.

This course will teach Jon how to automate more of his experimental work, and in the process make him realise there are other areas where some scripting would make writing his dissertation more efficient.

*

Paula doesn't consider herself a power user, but she knows the keyboard shortcuts for every application she uses, is familiar with the file system layout of her computer (and learnt what a file system is) thanks to a couple of misadventures clicking on interesting looking icons, and is known to her friends and colleagues as the go-to person whenever a computer misbehaves. Though she doesn't plan on making a career out of it, she is curious to gain an understanding of what's under the hood of all these applications she uses.

This course will teach Paula the fundamental steps and "bricks" that every program is made of, and help her understand why bugs happen and what makes them difficult to eradicate. Maybe putting together a short script to randomly assign secret Santas for the next Christ Kindle wouldn't be too hard, though...

I'm taking an online course at the P2P University, on "How to teach webcraft and programming to free-range students" taught by Greg Wilson.

Looking at the initial comments on the course it's possible I misunderstood what "free-range students" means ; from the course description I took it to mean teaching in various non-traditional settings, but it might actually be specifically about online learning (?). It's fine, the general concepts of "what is good teaching", "how people learn" and how to encourage independent learning will be helpful anyway. :)

First task

Our first task is to take a look at the IES (Institution of Educational Sciences) report on "Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning" (summarised in Greg's post here) and compare their recommendations to our own approach to teaching programming.

For the record, I teach sporadically in my own time, to small groups of 6 to 10 complete beginners, usually-but-not-always adults, in the local hackerspace.

Recommendation 1: Space learning over time.

Arrange to review key elements of course content after a delay of several weeks to several months after initial presentation.

In a 5 or 6 weeks-long course, this can be difficult. However, most concepts do build on top on each other: once learnt, they will be used every week from then on. The later concepts could benefit from regular review, but by then the course is about finished unfortunately.

Recommendation 2: Interleave worked example solutions with problem-solving exercises.

Have students alternate between reading already worked solutions and trying to solve problems on their own.

From the 2nd session of the course, I start by showing a short, working program to the class and ask them to think about what it could be doing, (trying to) figure out as a group what could be its purpose. This sounds more like review though, as it reuses the previous concepts. The report also reads that alternating working examples + exercises is hugely important. "Worked example solutions" should go into much more details than what I've been doing as well (showing intermediate steps, rather than only the final solution).

Recommendation 3: Combine graphics with verbal descriptions.

Combine graphical presentations (e.g., graphs, figures) that illustrate key processes and procedures with verbal descriptions.

I can't say that I'm really doing this. I'm projecting code, sometimes working out solutions in front of the class but this isn't particularly graphical. I'm not sure how to do this either. It actually reminds me of the approach to learning that Sean O'Leary mentioned in his talk on differentiated learning at the Reimagining Learning conference, where he told us about adding visual cues to quizzes and concepts to help dyslexic learners and students with a more visual approach. Although useful, this doesn't exactly match the IES report recommendation which advocates making sure the graphical element is directly relevant to the concept being taught.

Recommendation 4: Connect and integrate abstract and concrete representations of concepts.

Connect and integrate abstract representations of a concept with concrete representations of the same concept.

The report explains that students gain an understanding faster when using concrete examples, but then don't know how to transfer the knowledge to new problems ; while students who learn the concept abstractly struggle more initially but are then more flexible with the knowledge. The report advocates mixing up both, which I'm not doing or not doing well as my students tend to have trouble reusing previous concepts to break down more intricate problems on their own.

Recommendation 5: Use quizzing to promote learning.

Use quizzing with active retrieval of information at all phases of the learning process to exploit the ability of retrieval directly to facilitate long-lasting memory traces.

5a. Use pre-questions to introduce a new topic. I don't do this. I wonder if "previewing" an unknown programming concept would help learning, or increase confusion. It'd definitely need to solve a concrete problem, ideally that we encountered in the previous session.

5b. Use quizzes to re-expose students to key content. I don't do this either. (Actually, reading on the report, presenting small programs and asking students to figure out what it does may be considered a quiz, as it encourages them to retrieve previously learnt material). It's interesting, and I wonder how to apply it to teaching practical programming while keeping the questions short and meaningful (maybe tiny programs with missing bits, with a multiple choice as to what to fill the blank with?)

Recommendation 6: Help students allocate study time efficiently.

Assist students in identifying what material they know well, and what needs further study, by teaching children how to judge what they have learned.

6a. Teach students how to use delayed judgements of learning to identify content that needs further study. I'm not doing this, except perhaps brutally when giving exercises that a student doesn't know how to solve.

6b. Use tests and quizzes to identify content that needs to be learned. This advises giving a quiz, written or oral, could be done as a game, right after presenting new material, so students can assess what they actually do remember. I don't do this. Considering most of my students don't make the time for homework or studying at home, I don't know if this would be very effective on its own. Or perhaps it would highlight that they do need to study outside of the class and encourage them to do so...

Recommendation 7: Ask deep explanatory questions.

Use instructional prompts that encourage students to pose and answer “deep-level” questions on course material. These questions enable students to respond with explanations and supports deep understanding of taught material.

I do a tiny bit of this when I introduce a new concept or explain what an existing program does, but not very deeply, nor involving the class enough (it can be tough generating discussion!). Some of the suggestions include having students think aloud, then comment and build on each other's understanding.

I've been using the Michel Thomas Method to learn Japanese lately, using this set of CDs (8 hours). It works wonderfully well. The method only claims to teach you basic conversation skills, no writing or reading, and does so without requiring you to learn long lists of vocabulary or really, do anything outside of listening to the lessons. Each CD is cut into short lessons lasting between 3 and 8 minutes, and all you need to do is listen carefully and make use of the pause button to think of your answer before hearing the correct way to say something. There're 2 other students on the recordings, sometimes making mistakes and asking questions. You play the role of the 3rd student.

Through non-boring repetition, you learn how to structure different types of sentences and slowly add new words to your vocabulary. It's very enjoyable and you get a great sense of accomplishment when you remember things and figure out how to express something new. I usually listen on the bus -- I found listening while walking didn't work as well because a pedestrian needs to pay a lot of attention to their surroundings in the city if they'd like to not die, so I wasn't focused enough and ended up forgetting more.

The leaflet that comes with the box is adamant that your learning is the teacher's responsibility. You shouldn't try to learn stuff off by heart, or force yourself to remember or pick up new things in your own time. That makes me wonder how this applies to teaching programming. How much responsibility am I putting on the students to understand concepts, and how could I judiciously apply repetition and questioning to make people learn whether they want to or not?

This is really how these language lessons work. If you're listening, you have no choice but to learn. There's a free sample of the Japanese version and other languages on Audible, if you're curious to hear how it works.

(Update: I also posted on what I did after the Foundation Course, and ideas on what to do after finishing the Advanced Course)

Yesterday evening Google kindly hosted the GTUG meet-up, which I don't usually attend but considering some of my fellow hackerspace members were speaking on the panel I had to go and *cough*heckle*cough* support.

Google Storage and Predictions API

The first part of the evening was a talk by Martin Omander on 2 Google APIs:

• the Storage API

Figure out what you're good at so that you can focus on that (don't build your own telescope, use other people's tools). The Storage API is what Google use themselves, therefore they have people on pager to make sure it stays up so you don't have to. Libraries such as Boto work with it.

• the Predictions API

You feed it training data, over 3 steps: upload, train, predict. It can do categorisation (for e.g. language recognition), or return a number (e.g. real estate valuation). Input data can be text or numbers.

Hackerspaces and formal education

The juicy part of the evening was the panel, despite starting with a very biased intro from the moderator against education in favour of hackerspaces. Asking the panelists to choose a side might have also contributed to limit the discussion.

2 interesting topics straight from the panelists' introductions:

• To work around the lack of decent sysadmins around, John Looney from Google has created a short graduate program, where they train people for 5 months and then hire them.
• James Whelton is a startup founder that is currently working on "Coder Dojo", a project to bring programming and computing to kids. I had a quick chat with James after the panel and they are bringing this to Ireland, starting in Cork: it seems their process is to find mentors in a city, get the group started running events/workshops/classes on a Saturday afternoon and then they move on to the next city. I'm not quite sure it's a sustainable way to build a momentum but I will be following this very very closely, and perhaps mentor when they come to Dublin. Not entirely sure where to get the freshest source of info: Twitter account here, All Ireland (?) blog over there.

Someone mentioned Sugata Mitra's talk on learning without teachers again, I have to make the time to watch this.

A couple of interesting points:

• Hackerspaces as part of formal education, as a society, or part of the University -- someone brought up the problem of evaluation and how to grade work that would come out of such a setting; a panelist remarked that academia has been doing that for decades, with PhDs!
• If going the society way, be careful to build a community. It should help with getting momentum.

Although there was a nice flow when only the panel and moderator were speaking, I was disappointed with how the audience involvement and back and forth with the panel was handled. Some questions were completely ignored after being asked without giving a chance to the panel to answer, and people talking were encouraged to speak faster or less as we were running out of time. I would have preferred less questions explored more fully, rather than a rush of comments and unresolved question marks.

Everybody would agree there is much more to be discussed on the topic :) Thanks to the organisers for setting this up!

Link: Talk description and video

The Python Code Dojo is a community organised monthly meeting.

Dojo

A dojo is a place where you go to practice stuff, learning is a continuous process. It's based on the idea of deliberate practice.

Paris

Codingdojo.org was started in Paris, where it follows a very structured format.

Katas are forms that you practice to prepare yourself. You learn how to solve a problem using baby steps. In Paris they do this in silence, unless you really don't understand and have to ask a question. "Randori kata" is public pair programming, with a pilot and a co-pilot that solve a problem on stage.

London

The London Dojo works more like a seminar and attendees are encouraged to interrupt. Participation is expected. They do team dojo where the team must solve a problem within a timeframe. Problems are written on a blackboard, people vote for one and then everyone works at solving it in a team of 5 or 6 people over 1h30. Finally there is a show, tell, review and question event where each team presents their solution/approach.

Why participate in a dojo?

• The educational benefit, of learning by doing
• You can fail safely in a sympathetic environment, and experiment
• People teach one another, all levels can attend
• You build a community: in London, that's relaxing with pizza and beer

What's a good dojo?

From the attendee's perspective: it's fun, you get to solve problems, it's safe to make mistakes, show and tell is encouraged which is good to get feedback.

From the organiser's perspective: it self-organises, mostly.

To see if it's going well: see that there is a positive aim, something is done to reach this aim, with some sort of feedback at the end.

Personal observations

Beware of systems and gurus. Ignore systems if something else works for you, you can actually do damage otherwise. Learn to practice learning!

Q&A tidbits

When they (or another dojo?) started using meetup.com they doubled their numbers! Or EventBrite, the idea is to have a centralised system, with tickets to predict attendance.

The Squishy Circuits workshop organised in Tog yesterday was a success! Many thanks to awesome teacher Triona for showing us how to make a mess, I mean, have a lot of fun with conductive dough and learn a few basics of electricity and electronics :) Triona also shared tips on teaching the material, especially to kids.

Thanks a lot also to all our attendees for making the event such a success (and for helping clean up afterwards :-))! Notably this was a very kid-friendly event, and I hope we can have more of these in the hackerspace -- show first-hand the next generation of could-be scientists how fun and interesting science and technology are!

A tiny sample of the afternoon's creations:

(Update: You can see more pictures over at the Tog website)

Last week-end I attended the Re-imagining Learning conference in Limerick, a conference by the Educate Together folks aiming to rethink early secondary school.

As expected the majority of the talks were very interesting and/or inspiring. The way the schedule seemed to work, keynotes were meant to be higher level and make the audience think and ponder and imagine, while the sessions in between were more practical, sharing information on past or current initiatives by education professionals.

Attending a conference outside of my field was an interesting experience, although I found it awkward to introduce myself. I thought afterwards I should have simply left it to "I'm interested" rather than trying to justify my presence, but thinking again I'm not quite sure it really explains what the hell I'm doing here. Ah well. I can figure it out as I participate in more of these events, I guess.

I took a ton of notes, however as I haven't been good in the past at transcribing talks, I'll start by posting a mishmash of thoughts, themes and ideas that I took home with me.

First and foremost, there is a lot happening in Ireland in education at the moment, including curriculum reform (recommendations) at the Junior level. It was inspiring to be surrounded by professionals in the field who obviously care so deeply about what is going on and how to improve the state of things.

The Friday morning keynotes looked at the early years of the Junior level, covering how these first few years have a major impact that will affect the attitude of the student toward school until the end of their schooling. "Curriculum integration" was a big theme over the two days and another speaker noted curriculum cannot be looked at independently, it is heavily dependent on the political context even if we like to pretend it is neutral.

John Portelli's keynote was very interesting, explaining the importance of a critical-democratic framework and the dangers of pre-judging. He touched on a lot of themes and it was incredibly frustrating to see him having to rush through the ideas he was introducing. Although the conference was very professionally organised, time-keeping was terrible from the beginning and it put a lot of undue pressure on speakers who felt they had to fly through their material.

Some practical tips I picked up during some of the sessions:

• In Sean O'Leary's talk on science differentiation, he mentioned simple ways to make material more accessible, for instance language level readability. He showed examples of a science exercise, and how to rewrite it so that it means the exact same thing, the problem is framed the same, however the language is simpler which removes a potential barrier. That's something I absolutely want to look into, because I know I am guilty of it, as I tend to switch to smartass academic language whenever I write an exercise sheet that I know I will be handing out. He also uses visual cues as often as possible to help with memory (rebus). To dos:
  • Find a site or software to assess the readability level of the material I write.
  • Check out the Science Differentiation Pack the speaker worked on and see what I can use in there
• Neil Bulter showed us all sorts of games he used in class to encourage students to develop their problem solving skills. See notably Fantastic Contraptions, Gravity Pods, and Light bot. To dos:
  • This last one I must check out properly and see if it can help newcomers come to term with how programming works

Some general ideas that stick to mind:

• Like everyone teenagers want to know more about themselves, understand who they are and what is their place in the world. By teaching them about development theories they can learn to make better decisions. Development theories include multiple intelligences, etc.
• Teaching in groups is excellent and the ideal way to do things, however the teacher needs to help/teach/promote higher level thinking and discussions, to move it beyond disputes (e.g. partner phrases)
• I didn't know the Irish Computer Society was so involved with school and education! They train schools in using technology to engage with students. And they even have an awesome Scratch handbook! To dos:
  • Get the handbook
  • Find out more!
• Many times speakers put forward the idea of having the teacher stand back and act more as a facilitator and guide. For instance, community-based learning (Martin Galvin), that encourages young people to look into a problem in their community (e.g. nutrition based health problems) and learn about it in a self-driven way and through community service. Giving an ill-structured problem (a very general question) that has no clear-cut answer, and let students run with it! See also the Global Learning Initiative Project (Lori Holcom) that hooks up students with other students from schools around the world.

Some books/articles I want to look into:

• The Passionate Teacher, 1995
• Something to learn more about teacher follow-up moves, by Brodie (2008). This was mentioned as part of the talk on "fostering a 'conjecturing atmosphere' in mathematics lessons" (Therese Dooley).

Of course the conference covered all these topics (and more!) in much more details and I have a lot of things to think about, think through and hopefully use to better my own beginner-teaching and make it more relevant.

Additionally, I met with Paddy, a retired school principal from Cork, who was kind enough to give me some advice on how to find a school near where I live and who to talk with to see about teaching programming to high school students. A big to-do!

In 2 weeks I will be attending the "Re-imagining learning" conference in Limerick. I'm really looking forward to it! I'm not quite sure what to expect but I'm fairly confident I will have a great time and learn many new things. In particular, I'll pay close attention to talks and discussions on the cross-over of education and technology and ICT in education in general. I'm also quietly hopeful I'll be able to chat with someone who will have suggestions on how I can find and approach a local school about potentially teaching intro to programming classes to their students.

Can't wait! :-D Will be meeting old friends and acquaintances in Limerick while over there as well.

As planned I attended the Inventorium event yesterday. Thankfully the event content and atmosphere matched the flyer's tone, as opposed to the website's (guess I'm not the audience for that one!)

The evening started with nibbles and sort of cringe worthy "networking" exercises that felt quite a bit forced but... thanks to it I actually ended up chatting to someone with a very interesting background, a woman with a 20 year long career as a software developer who's now training to become a teacher. I wish we had had more time to chat and I'll be in touch, I have tons of questions! :-) So yeah, I can sneer all I want, but it looks like these networky thingies have some value -- for better or worse!

Overall I had a very good time and found the talks interesting, sometimes insightful, and other times even inspiring. The evening started with people introducing the Inventorium project, etc. Then there was a wonderful 30 minutes keynote from Jonathan Drori about digital businesses in general and educational digital businesses in particular. This was followed by 7 short talks, 10 minutes long, by various people interested in and involved in education in some way. The speakers included a teacher and a pupil, which I think brought a very important perspective (Aron's candid talk generated many smiles!).

Random highlights:

• Brendan Tangney, who was the second to last speaker, showed us a graph that went a bit like this:

        + 2
       / \    _ _ _ _ + 4
      /	  \ /
     /     + 3
  1 +

with names such as 1. "New technology trigger", 2. "Peak of inflated expectations, 3. "Trough of disillusionment" and 4. "Plateau of productivity", x axis as time. When he asked the audience what stage we thought ICT in education was at, answers varied between 1, 2 and 3. Turns out everyone was right, kinda: we have an interesting issue in ICT in education, in that we keep looping from 1 to 3, and then instead of trying to figure out how to go through the "slope of enlightenment" (between 3 and 4) we just go back to 1 with the latest technological novelty. Considering how many people mentioned the iPad and its potential for this or that, I thought that point really hit home!

• I knew about Camara's work in Africa, but I didn't know they were also getting involved in education in Ireland, providing refurbishing PCs to disadvantaged schools and teaching training! This is great!

• Stephen Carey, the teacher, talked to us about the Suas "Bridge 2 College" program and the gap it attempts to fill. To illustrate his main point, that collaboration between students is the best way to learn, he showed us this wonderful picture of how they've rethought the classroom layout for the program. I wish I could find the exact same picture but this one gives an idea already -- it's impossible to simply stand at the front and blandly lecture.

• Martin Owen showed us the toy for pre-schoolers his company is developing... and I want some of these tiles for myself, check out the videos!!

Very happy with my evening. I will be watching out for upcoming Inventorium events and the project's outputs.

A couple of weeks ago, I picked up an Inventorium flyer in Tog (wonder who left them there!), and I thought I would register/apply for their symposium in the Science Gallery, now tomorrow night, as the themes appear to touch on many of the education and tech topics that are close to my heart (here's a link to the PDF flyer). It all looks and sounds terribly interesting, and I'm looking forward to learn a few things.

I was kind of planning on going as an enthusiastic mostly-observer, but I must say after spending more time reading the Inventorium website, it's indeed likely to be the case. I don't know if the kind of ideas I have, more like opinions really, together with the occasional quirky endeavour, will be relevant for this "symposium". I have trouble mapping the language on their site to the approachable content of the flyer. Still -- I'm sure it'll be very interesting, and at least I'll learn how closely I should follow the Inventorium efforts over the next few years :-)

I added a notice to my previous courses notes to indicate that they are now available under the CC-BY-NC license. I don't know if it'll be in any way useful -- as I'm well aware the courses could use a huge amount of improvement (working on it!) -- but it seems worth doing.

Note to interested parties: If you're only looking for exercises to use in your own courses, don't worry about the license and just grab them. I would only humbly request, that you feel very free to also share back any exercise or resources you found useful to teach the basics -- I always struggle to find more! :-) Add a comment or contact me directly.

I got "How to survive your first year in teaching" after finding some very positive reviews and it's been worth every cent -- from the beginning I had to stop reading to take notes and add bookmarks for future reference. The target is "real" teachers (at the primary and secondary level) who are preparing for the first year of teaching on their own after their training.

At my level (volunteer unqualified teacher), I found the book tips very good to help structure both a course and specific lessons. There are many activity ideas to try out in class and suggestions to avoid sticking only to one teaching style (e.g. lecturing) -- it doesn't matter what age group you're teaching, there will be something useful and I've already been applying some of them. I'll be re-reading the behaviour and class management chapters when I teach high school students again (having a clue what to do will hopefully help in these situations!)

For non-professional teachers like me, there are a number of chapters that don't apply, like class decoration or school administrative tasks. I still found them interesting on my first read-through though I'll likely skip them on subsequent reads (and I learnt a bit about the UK school system... for instance I thought "houses" only existed in the Harry Potter world :-)).

The kind of sections I bookmarked: activities to try in class, balanced lesson planning, setting aims and objectives, differentiation, resources to spice up lessons, assessing and marking (great to understand the types of feedback you can offer), grading and writing reports (feedback to students once again). I was pleased to read the section on differentiation and find that I had figured out a lot of it on my own, though I could definitely improve on differentiating for weaker students. Might need some additional resources on the topic. Anyone has recommendations to offer?

After a bit of tension over securing a room, someone sorted us out and I will therefore be teaching another introduction to programming with Python, to a group of beginners, starting Monday! Exciting. I have a draft of everything I want to do on the first day, I need to print it out proper before the end of the week as we probably won't have Internet access during the class. I'll be teaching adults again. The class that I meant to cap at 8 students now has 10, admire my ability to say "No" :) (Update: Though I'm told only 5 confirmed for this Monday! Typical.) Hope it works out.

In the meantime, here are a couple of interesting links about teaching programming to kids, that I want to be able to find again later:

• Teaching Kids to Program, or Don't Try to Teach 8-Year-Olds Java Subclassing. High-level, describes a way to get involved with schools and different approaches to teach kids to program (surprisingly, or not when you think about it, programming Lego Mindstorms proved a failure. For robots perhaps programming Roombas would work better, as they should be less prone to randomness... (?))
• Umonya. This sounds like my "crash course" idea but on steroids and targeting kids, which makes it a ton more awesome and about that much more scary-insane. The presentation I was linked to says 18h + 6h optional over one week-end, which is... wow!

Both these links actually come from recent posts on the WoMoz mailing list, which seems to be straying from "getting more women involved in Mozilla projects" toward generally steering and encouraging women, girls, and young people in general towards programming. Interesting.

Here's an interesting article, "Cheating in Computer Science", that was recently posted on the IAEP mailing list. It's quite short and the problems it describes are worth mulling over:

• Why do we call "cheating" what will later in life be called "collaborating" and be a critical quality for success?
• Why do our education systems focus so hard on having students learn something in a specific intricate way that facilitates grading, rather than on the best way to learn the right thing?

I quite like the author's idea of changing the game, to reduce the motivation for cheating and encourage learning instead of simply working harder at punishing cheaters.

On a more practical note, he describes how he changed his way of teaching programming from the usual writing of a program from scratch without talking to anyone or reusing any code, to the following:

"Instead I give them programs that work and ask them to change their behavior. I give them programs that do not work and ask them to repair them. I give them programs and ask them to decompose them. I give them executables and ask them for source, un-commented source and ask for the comments, description, or specification."

I love this! Added to my stash of exercises-to-prepare for my next teaching adventure. Which should happen in January, by the way :-)

Stones into Schools is the follow-up story to Three cups of tea, starting in 2003 where we left Greg Mortenson looking to expand the Central Asia Institute mission to building schools in Afghanistan. As expected the story is just as engaging and fascinating as the one narrated in the first book, and beautifully advocates for education, especially girl education and promoting literacy for girls and women. It also offers a candid view of life in countries suffering from their proximity or association with the Talibans, and of people and their daily life that's otherwise difficult to grasp from only watching the news.

It's heartbreaking to read about their work and the descriptions of horrors and tragedies during the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, when nearly every day we hear about the terrible flooding the country is now suffering from. I wonder how many schools and CAI schools are affected and if the CAI is able to help...

Despite and around all this, I found myself getting excited and worried and anxious every time the CAI "Dirty Dozen" worked their ass off to get a new school built, as each always seems to bring so much suspense and so many challenges. I think their school tally is up to 131, at the end of this book completed around August 2009.

The story gives an interesting perspective on the American military, that I certainly appreciated as someone usually suspicious of that establishment. Conversely, the narrator isn't always very kind when comparing the CAI work style with that of other NGOs working in those areas. Other NGOs tend to appear out of touch, e.g. traversing poor areas in expensive black SUVs with gigantic antennas... Perhaps the sentiment is justified.

A minor grip I have with the book would be a writing style quirk whereby every few pages a section ends with a phrasing like "but little did they know blah blah", it feels a bit like a cheap trick especially used so heavily, when it's unnecessary considering how compelling the story is on its own merit.

This really is a fantastic, inspiring and instructive story, I would recommend to anyone with either an interest in education or who generally enjoys reading to give one of these two books a try.