I have now completed my first offering of CMPT 383, Comparative Programming Languages.<\/p>\n
I had forgotten how much work a new course prep is, particularly as I am anal-retentive enough to not be able to make much use of any other instructor’s course materials. Other instructors just do things… wrong. The only way for a course to feel right is to do it my way, for myself. Giving lectures from somebody else’s notes is like wearing somebody else’s underwear: technically probably just fine, but you just feel dirty.<\/p>\n
That’s not to say other people who teach the same courses I do do a bad job: they are generally excellent instructors teaching excellent courses. They just do it wrong, is all.<\/p>\n
But, looking at my plan for 383<\/a>, I came in pretty close to the plan. The final balance of topics was more like 6 weeks, 4 weeks, 3 weeks, but that’s astonishingly close for somebody who usually just stops somewhere around the midterm and thinks “does that feel like about half of the material? Okay good.”<\/p>\n Overall, I’m very happy with it. First offerings of a course are supposed to be bumpy and full of things that you wish you could have done better. Honestly, this was one of my favourite course offerings ever: there are tweaks I’d do for my next offering, but all are fairly minor.<\/p>\n Specifics:<\/p>\n The feedback I have had from the student side has been very good so far (with the real teaching evaluations still outstanding). I have never before had so many students who had nothing to do with a course<\/em> talk to me about it. Random students in the hall thought my project was a good idea; everybody and their dog knew about my first assignment; people with friends in the course want to know when I’m teaching it again.<\/p>\n I’ll take that as creating a “buzz” and call it a good thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have now completed my first offering of CMPT 383, Comparative Programming Languages. I had forgotten how much work a new course prep is, particularly as I am anal-retentive enough to not be able to make much use of any other instructor’s course materials. Other instructors just do things… wrong. The only way for a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1100"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1107,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1100\/revisions\/1107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gregbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n