Teaching CS in Dallas

Early Start - Week 1 Done!

I'm loving this program, almost as much as I liked the program I did in June.

We have around 35 students who have come at least once and registered.  We have them split into 4 groupds.

It is SO nice to teach students and not have to worry about accountability.  Just do what you love to do. 

So we're doing Alice and most students are doing it and enjoying it.  Each day I start out by showing them something new, and then I get out of their way and work.  Most everyone is doing something, and it's fun to see how they make Alice and their world theirs.  I've got one kid that is recording rap stuff.  I've got kids asking about if they can do something, which has including blowing things up and having characters bleed. I point them in a direction and then get out of the way. 

In fact, that's really the way I like to teach.  I like to give an assignment:

Create an Alice world with at least two objects interacting and repeating actions without duplicating commands.

Then I like to get out of the way and let them be creative.  If they get stuck, I'll show them part of the answer -- like a kid wanted something to blow up so I showed him how to make a fire start out small and get big (using resizing) and suggested moving body parts. 

And yeah, I know they want to do violent stuff.

On the bad end, we have a group of boys who don't want to play.  I had to turn the internet off for that class, as they kept wasting time by going into a game.  We'll start with the internet off on Monday and see what happens.

I have a feeling that the game players are frequent flyers for the Assistant Principal's office.

Going well

Today I finally felt at home in my classroom. I could find things without walking across the room and getting in the other desk. I could see all my students.

One of them was playing games with their workstation and making noise when we were working on problems together. I think I figured out who -- my biggest clue was that the speaker icon was showing in his desk tray and I have the computers set up so that it isn't there. I pointed that out to him, and didn't have any problems after that.

I have to be out Thursday, at a Computer Science workshop and I think I have all my copies made. Tomorrow I'm going to write instructions and organize everything.

It is feeling good!

Getting better

Most of my workstations are where I want them. I have some tweaking to do. I also need to move some equipment.

Also, I am supposed to lose some of my Algebra I students about the end of next week, my principal has hired another math teacher. I move that we give him the majority of Spanish speakers as he is more comfortable teaching in Spanish -- however, I don't believe in teaching high school kids in Spanish. As long as the tests are in English we need to speak English!

I'm also having problems with the Novell server. I use Examview for assessment etc. I run it on my Novell server. We did an assessment in first period and everything was fine. My second period comes in, after I do a reboot on all the workstations and we get a "Tree or Server" not found. I've got to find a better or an alternative way, as this makes me crazy.

I'm not exactly sure what is happening, but it seems to me that there must be a table on the server similar to a DNS table that keeps track of where the Novell servers are at and mine got lost. I can never get a good answer on that, so if anyone reads this and is a Novell expert, I'd love an explaination.