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The summer semester has started with a vengeance, though not quite as much vengeance as I was expecting. Somehow I'd been under the impression that the section of CS3 I'm teaching would meet every day, but in fact it is only Tuesdays and Thursdays, so that's a full day of my life that I just got back over the next eight weeks. However, this has not prevented me from having no time sense whatsoever. Classes started on Tuesday, but the part of my brain which manages scheduling insisted "first day of classes = Monday," so I spent yesterday morning scrambling around putting together sample code, a list of books the students might find useful, and a page of links to tutorials and the like so that they don't get completely lost in the migration from Java to C++. Then one of my co-workers wandered by and asked if I wanted to go to lunch. "Can't do it today," I apologised, "but I'll be free on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays." To his credit, he did not give me the you've-just-grown-a-second-head look I so richly deserved, and merely pointed out, "Um, it is Wednesday."
So I did get a nice lunch. But between that and having glitched on the fact that this weekend was the scheduled date for a) Justin's wedding, and b) drill, in regard to which I had made plans with DelphiGoth to stay with him at his parents' place (since they live in the Quad Cities and I therefore wouldn't have to drive nearly as far at strange hours of the morning), I'm feeling uncomfortably dazed. Bludgeoned about by time, as it were. I hate finding out that I've double-booked myself, because then there's no way to avoid disappointing somebody, and while arguably the fairest solution is to honour the commitment that was made first, that doesn't keep people from being disappointed.
</mope>
On the plus side, though, teaching is going well so far, though the students are far more like my zombie class from last semester than the wretched hive of scum and villainy that was my other class. Today I showed them how pass-by-reference works in contrast to pass-by-value, gave them some brief examples of what pointers do (and some real-world examples of why one would want to use pointers and references to save on overhead), and provided a short homily on type-safe vs. type-unsafe languages, bounds checking, and How To Get Into Trouble With Arrays. (Sadly, I didn't have time to get into buffer overflow exploits. I think I'll save that until they've shown me they deserve it.) Some of them seem reasonably sharp already. I haven't seen enough of them yet to figure out who's just quiet and who's never going to get it. Eight weeks might not be enough time to determine that kind of thing. But we'll see.
The networking class is also going pretty well. So far I'm the only one who says anything. So far it's all been right, too. This is a little disturbing, as I really don't know that much about networking, or at least I didn't think I did.
If I start feeling less out of it, maybe I'll talk about Geek Pool Night, which was a lot of fun, but I think it's going to be another one of those really introverted days. :-/
So I did get a nice lunch. But between that and having glitched on the fact that this weekend was the scheduled date for a) Justin's wedding, and b) drill, in regard to which I had made plans with DelphiGoth to stay with him at his parents' place (since they live in the Quad Cities and I therefore wouldn't have to drive nearly as far at strange hours of the morning), I'm feeling uncomfortably dazed. Bludgeoned about by time, as it were. I hate finding out that I've double-booked myself, because then there's no way to avoid disappointing somebody, and while arguably the fairest solution is to honour the commitment that was made first, that doesn't keep people from being disappointed.
</mope>
On the plus side, though, teaching is going well so far, though the students are far more like my zombie class from last semester than the wretched hive of scum and villainy that was my other class. Today I showed them how pass-by-reference works in contrast to pass-by-value, gave them some brief examples of what pointers do (and some real-world examples of why one would want to use pointers and references to save on overhead), and provided a short homily on type-safe vs. type-unsafe languages, bounds checking, and How To Get Into Trouble With Arrays. (Sadly, I didn't have time to get into buffer overflow exploits. I think I'll save that until they've shown me they deserve it.) Some of them seem reasonably sharp already. I haven't seen enough of them yet to figure out who's just quiet and who's never going to get it. Eight weeks might not be enough time to determine that kind of thing. But we'll see.
The networking class is also going pretty well. So far I'm the only one who says anything. So far it's all been right, too. This is a little disturbing, as I really don't know that much about networking, or at least I didn't think I did.
If I start feeling less out of it, maybe I'll talk about Geek Pool Night, which was a lot of fun, but I think it's going to be another one of those really introverted days. :-/