Greg and Kat's blog

My lectures this semester are three hour chunks on Wednesday evenings. Evening lectures are late, but that’s not too big a deal. The problem is the three hour marathon.

Lecturing is more draining that people probably realize. There’s a lot of pacing back and forth, gesturing wildly, and staring into an overhead projector. Three hours at a stretch is pretty long.

Of course it’s mentally draining. The problem is talking while trying to figure out what you’re going to say next. Not saying something retarded in a three-hour span is pretty hard. I have a great deal of sympathy for politicians and celebrities who spend a lot of time on camera: the odds of saying something stupid are really high and that’s naturally the thing that gets remembered.

I think I have stumbled on a winning strategy to not feel like I have been beaten with a stick after three hours. I have been going down to the food course in Harbour Centre and getting a smoothie just before class. I drink it just before/at the start of class

My theory is that the smoothie does two things: keeps me hydrated and keeps the blood sugar up. I haven’t felt too bad after lecture the weeks when I have done that.

A coffee in the morning (which I don’t usually have, so I’m sensitive to the caffeine) seems to help too.

Apparently, we’re looking for a TA for CMPT 275 in the summer and are considering undergrads. Email Tracy (tbruneau@) if you’re interested.

In week 2 of the semester, I started blogging for CMPT 376. Since then, I have made 37 posts with an average of 284 words per post (not counting this post).

If I had blogged thrice-weekly during that time, there should have been 36 posts. Somehow an extra post slipped in there. The offender seems to be a throwaway post about gaining back an hour of my jetlag.

I managed to more-or-less keep the Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule too, but certainly wasn’t too anal about a little drifting:

Posts by day of week: MWF schedule kind of worked.

I also allowed Ted to mock me during lectures. I have clearly earned my full 5% class participation marks and will appeal anything less. As the one who handles mark appeals, I’m pretty sure I will emerge victorious.

That makes my final mark in the course… 5%. Hrm. Clearly I haven’t taken the most efficient route to passing the course. I guess it’s time to do what every student who is about to fail miserably does right before the final: email the instructor and ask if the course is going to be curved. (If you thought the thing after the colon in that sentence was going to be “study”, shame on you.)

Certainly the most surprising thing for me from the course is how really easy the daily writing exercises (a.k.a. blog posts) were. It turns out that I actually think three things a week. Writing close to 300 words about each one didn’t feel like work at all.

I am firmly convinced that writing is like any form of physical activity: the more you do it, the easier it gets. The dailies were a good way to exercise the writing muscle.

So, if I ever end up teaching 376, I will certainly keep the daily writing. I probably wouldn’t do as much free-writing as Ted did, not because I don’t see the value, but doing it in lecture time just isn’t my style. I would probably keep the assignment structure more-or-less the same as well. The thing that would scare me about the course is that, even having seen Ted give most of his lectures, I have no idea what I’d say in 150 minutes of lecture per week.

Oh well, let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.

Edit: I thought it might be worth sharing the email I sent to Ted as promised above:

Dear Prof Dr Kirkpetrik,

im a student in ur COMP 376 class. i want 2 know if the class is going to be on curved grading or regular? i am worry about my mark, so i want to know what happens.

Maybe there’s a little hyperbole there, but down around the bottom of a first year class, that’s not totally out of range. As you can see, it’s not just ESL issues, but total lack of attention to detail: prof’s name and course number are incorrect. Also note that the form of the question indicates a level of understanding which means an honest answer to the question (e.g. “not curved”) will not help the student in any way.

I was on another University Board of Student Discipline case yesterday. (I was on the Board, not bringing a case forward.) I mentioned a UBSD case previously where I was on the board, and the case resulted in a big and complicated penalty.

The penalty in this case (that we recommended to the President) was a new one for me, simpler, and fairly rare for SFU: permanent expulsion from the University.

The case ended up being even more severe than I thought when I got there. The core issue was impersonation during a midterm and final exam. The student (the real student) had a previous academic dishonesty case, and there were some other aggravating factors after the case began. Altogether, it ended up as a really serious case.

Something I did learn is that impersonating someone in a final exam, or benefiting from it is a criminal code violation:

Every one who falsely, with intent to gain advantage for himself or some other person, personates a candidate at a competitive or qualifying examination held under the authority of law or in connection with a university, college or school or who knowingly avails himself of the results of such personation is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

The University likely won’t recommend charges in this case, but it’s good to know it’s an option. Note that it’s the criminal code (police, handcuffs, and jail), not the civil code (fines and lawsuits).

As many of you know, I’m teaching CMPT 470 downtown in the summer. Since I’m on sabbatical from fall 2008 to summer 2009, if you want to take CMPT 470 from me any time soon, this is your chance.

The School had already committed to offering 470 downtown in the summer semester. Rather than offer a tiny section downtown and a regular section in Burnaby, we decided to do the course downtown only. Lectures are 3 hours on Wednesday nights.

That will kinda leave me with 6 day weekends. Things don’t really work that way, but it will mean Kat and I can do a little not-too-far travelling during the summer.

Here’s a tidbit about SFU’s network infrastructure that I bet will be news to most of you: SFU has an instant messaging server.

Just fire up your favourite open source, multi-protocol IM client: Pidgin for Linux or Windows or Adium for OSX. Create an account with these settings:

• Protocol: XMPP/Jabber/Google Talk (whatever your client calls it)
• Host/server/domain: jabber.sfu.ca
• User/screen name: your regular SFU userid (possibly with “@jabber.sfu.ca”)
• Password: your regular SFU password
• Port: 5223
• Encryption: SSL/TLS. “Force old SSL” in Pidgin. (No, I don’t know why it matters.)

I don’t know for sure that students can use this, but it’s worth a shot.

Maybe this is a good excuse to finally do some kind of “student questions by IM” thing in my classes. What was always stopping me was not wanting to pollute my regular IM accounts with non-fun things. A separate account would let me turn it on when working and off the rest of the time.

I’m still not really sure what IM with my students buys me though. Slight coolness, in exchange for even more hasty, poorly thought out questions than email. I sense fail.

According to Google, “enrolment management” is a fairly Canadian term, and it’s one that comes up a lot in my life. The general problem is keeping the right number of bums in seats in our program (or faculty or University). In recent history, that has meant trying to increase the numbers.

As far as I’m concerned, there are four main parts of EM:

1. Outreach: Going out into the world (often to schools) and getting people interested in the discipline. There’s no direct EM outcome to outreach, but it’s an important long-term thing. I’m a big believer in CS Unplugged for CS outreach.
2. Recruitment: Convincing people that you have a good program, and getting them to apply. Recruitment is the part of EM that usually gets all the attention.
3. Conversion: Converting the applications into actual students. This includes convincing the applicants to accept your offer, and making sure that acceptances actually show up in September. Conversion is often forgotten or lumped into recruitment.
4. Retention: Once the students get it the door, making sure we keep them around until they graduate.

Retention is probably the most controversial of the group, because of the fear that it will take the most blunt form possible: “Stop failing the dumb kids.”

Maybe I have been sheltered, but I have never heard anybody push in that direction. Most retention activities focus on improving learning skills (like AEP) or other aspects of the student experience.

It turns out that something like 2/3 of the students that disappear are in good academic standing (i.e. not the dumb kids). My experience is that even among students in poor academic shape, the problem is often not straight-up dumbness, but poor study skills, lack of focus, or other factors that don’t necessarily mean we don’t want them around.

Basically, I’m convinced that we can actually do something about retention, as long as it’s done from the bottom up in the School, not top-down by the administration.

While at SIGCSE, my favourite session was probably the retention session: all of the papers were interesting and actually presented quantitative results. The most relevant to me was the paper from Georgia Tech. We suck compared to them.

I’m spending tomorrow downtown at a Student Success (aka retention) workshop. Hopefully it leaves us with some good ideas that we can actually implement around SFU.

This morning’s keynote talk at SIGCSE was by Marissa Mayer who is the Google VP of Search Products & User Experience. As she was giving a really good talk, I looked her up in Wikipedia.

Apparently, she was born in 1975. Fuck. That’s the same year I was born.

She did some user studies for Google during her MSc and went to work there when she was done. She did more user studies there, and worked on the original Google web server. She’s also a much better speaker than I am.

So, while I’ve been pissing around teaching a bunch of punk kids computing science, this chicky* has been getting rich by being brilliant. Seriously brilliant: she knows her shit, and it’s very clear from listening to her.

Sigh. Is there an English word that combines the concepts of “crush” and “envy”? I have that.

(*) chicky (chĭkē) n. A woman who is probably often underestimated by misogynists because she is young and attractive, shortly before they find themselves in her wake wondering what happened to their testicles.

After a luxurious 40 hours in Vancouver, I’m heading off again tomorrow. This time to SIGCSE ’08: the ACM‘s (Association for Computing Machinery’s) Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education conference. In short: the big CS education conference.

Tactical error: I booked my tickets without looking at the conference schedule closely. There’s nothing on Wednesday that I can really go to. Wednesday is all special-interest things that cost extra. So, I have an extra day to hang around Portland. Fine I guess, but there’s probably stuff I should be doing in Vancouver.

Other than that, there’s not a single session where there isn’t something I’m interested in. Hopefully, it will be a good couple of days.

As some of you know, I’m starting a one year sabbatical in September. There’s a lot to say about that, but for today, I’m going to limit myself to one of the plans.

I’d like to get to a point that I can teach CMPT 383 (Comparative Programming Languages). One of the things I’d like to do for that is expand my own breadth of experience with programming languages. I have worked with a bunch, but there are a lot more out there, and most programmers don’t give them enough thought. My goal for the year is to learn one language per month.

Of course, I wouldn’t have time to do a huge project in each. I’d like to get to the point that I could write some small (but functional) programs and know “the way” of the language. Here are some of the languages that come immediately to mind:

• Haskell: I have used Miranda (which is similar), and took a functional programming course at SFU that used Haskell, but that was all a long time ago. I’d like to go through for a refresher.
• Prolog: Again, I used Prolog back in the 383-like course I took in my undergrad, but it has been a long time.
• OCaml: People who like OCaml really like it. That’s the kind of thinking that brought me to Python a few years ago, so it might be worth a look.
• Lua: A lightweight scripting language that also seems to have some rabid fans.
• Lisp: I find it a little odd that I’ve gotten this far in life and never written any Lisp. Time to right that wrong.
• C#: The only language on the list that’s widely considered “practical”. I know it’s kind of just MS Java, but there might be something good in there. Plus, the Mono implementation seems to be working now, so I wouldn’t have to use Windows to do it.
• Matlab or Octave: I like the array-based thing, and want to try some real stuff with it.
• Erlang: You could say that Erlang is Just Another Functional Language, but it was developed by Ericsson for real practical stuff. That distinguishes it as interesting.
• D: People like it, and it comes after C, right? That’s some good marketing.
• Some esoteric programming language. These are mostly conceived as jokes, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to learn from them.

That’s ten without even thinking too hard. There’s a really great list of programming languages by category in Wikipedia.

I think the way to go about this is to create something like an informal Programming Language Study Group. That way, there would be other people hounding me to keep going (and vice versa). We could have a few little exercises for each language, maybe.

Who’s with me?