[TriLUG] "TBA" Course Curriculum and Other Matters

[Kevin Hunter]

At 2:22pm -0400 on Tue, 09 Dec 2008, James Olin Oden wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 2:12 PM, James Tuttle <jjtuttle at trilug.org> wrote:
>> I am a developer, though that isn't my primary responsibility.  Please
>> do explain from where you got the 'idea that coding is foreign' to
>> anyone who responded to this thread.  You're jumping to the wrong
>> conclusion, I think.
>
> Kevin's response which said:   I like to code, but on my own time.

I'll respond to clarify my thinking when I wrote that, and then say no 
more on this subject.

I'm sorry that I left the impression that I don't like to code, or that 
coding is foreign.  I *do* like to code, and code almost every night for 
fun.  However, I don't generally like to do it in class-room style 
settings because it's a waste of lots of peoples time making sure 
everyone is caught up, dealing with out-side-scope-of-class technology 
issues, tracking down a student linker issue, or spotting a student's 
typo.  It's sometimes worse with tech audiences because they think 
they're uber smarts and do email/web instead, then miss a detail here or 
there and hold everyone else up.  I've been doing a lot of exactly that 
over the past two summers, teaching folks mechanics of such.  It's a hassle.

I'm personally more about concepts, and then let details get sorted out 
on one's own time.  That's how I'll bet most of us learned to code, on 
our own time, learning different arguments, errors, warnings, 
best-practices, and so-forth.  Programming *is* fun, but it requires a 
melding of mind and hand that I claim is difficult to get in a large 
classroom of people.  If the group size is less than 5, then no biggie. 
  But over 4 (the magic number that I've discovered for my teaching 
styles) and classroom productivity goes down.

It occurs to me, that we may also not be seeing eye-to-eye on what it 
means to have a coding session.  When I think "coding session," I think 
of walking students through mechanics of a language or the important 
parts of an API, and then assign an algorithm or problem for homework. 
This gets the concepts through, and lets students put the nitty-gritty 
details together later.  Perhaps you're thinking more along the lines of 
what Alan walked us through a couple of months ago with the 
extra-awesome ovens?

In any event, I'll not respond to any further comments on this 
particular subject line as I think it's starting to get unnecessarily 
heated.  I'll mention a programming topic suggestion in a sister-sub-thread.

Kevin