The Goldfish Chronicles

I’m very close to agreeing to do some Java teaching in the evenings for the next 5 months. I’ve been teaching/mentoring people since I first did Java [my course had a lot of non-hard-code coders on it], though I’ve never actually taught a class [16 in this case].

My largest worries are over the lack of a strong syllabus or existing slides. Sounds like we’ll use Thinking in Java though, and apparantly Bruce Eckel has some slides I can base off. I guess I’ll just go through the book and highlight chapters I want to teach.

One interesting thing is going to be UK vs US style teaching. In the UK [for me at least], there were no books you had to have with homework of reading chapters. Maybe a couple of courses had them, buggered if I can remember. I’m not sure if these students are expecting to go home with a homework of “read chapter 5″ or if they expect to go home with programs I want them to code. It’s not for a computer-course but some kind of business course, so that may affect the style. Plus there’s an online element. So I might have to write painful multiple-choice style quizzes.

It would be cool if I could setup my own system with Applets, though I wouldn’t have the time to develop it, but I’ll be stuck on the college’s system.

Another hard thing is the renumeration. It’s actually good money for the hours I’ll be teaching I think, but it’s poor money for the effect I suspect it will have on me in terms of hours. My wife and I share a car, so an 8->9:30 lesson actually involves me staying at work 2 hours late. Or driving a lot more.

Still. There will be two major benefits. Public talking, which with the dearth of numbers at our JUG has been hard to achieve, and discovering if I like teaching, or just being an assistant.

Also, there’s the academic discounts while an educator While I’ve not really got my eyes on anything, unless I choose to use Keynote or something for presentations, there must be some things out there that will perk my interest.

Anyone know a company who do sizable academic-discounts on rack-servers?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 21st, 2004 at 11:21 pm and is filed under Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.