Geeky Mom

Blogs vs. Term papers

Laura — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 03:05:21 +0000

A lot of people have been pointing me to this article on using blogs in writing classes instead of term papers. For an extensive answer, see my dissertation from 2007. Just sayin’. But yeah, communication forms change. That doesn’t mean we do away with argument and evidence and critical thinking. I mean, we used to give speeches (without teleprompters) all the time. We spoke poems. Now we have radio, tv, print articles, books, web sites, youtube, all kinds of ways of conveying an argument. We should teach all those.

Who are my students

Laura — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 02:04:56 +0000

For my How to Teach Webcraft and Programming class, we are supposed to describe our students. So, below are some of my descriptions of students present and past as well as myself as a student. I’ve had a wide range of students, but interestingly, they do sort of fit into categories.

The Artist

I’ve had/have a lot of students who have tremendous artistic talent. They often know their way around Photoshop or Illustrator and are looking to take their talents to the web or into graphics through programming. Many of these, maybe most, are quite independent, perhaps because they have worked independently on their art. They are often the kind of student I can give some key Google terms to or hand them a book and they’ll come back having figured out something cool. Past students have created fabulous flash videos or beautiful-looking web sites. Not all, but some, get confused by the logic of scripting and get frustrated when scripting “messes up” their work.

The Over-Achiever

To me, this is the classic CS student in many ways. These are the kids who enter the science fair without being told to, who read a lot, who take an overload of courses, and, of course, who hack their own computers at the age of 5. Interestingly, my students often do everything but that last one. So, I get students with the smarts and drive to accomplish anything, but who avoid the innards of computers. These students usually pick up things fast, but not always. Sometimes they get frustrated when they don’t because usually everything comes pretty easy to them. But I do find them to be persistent, though sometimes not as independent as the artist-types above.

The Reluctant Learner

I get these when I teach required classes or required training sessions. These students have run the gamut from adults tasked with maintaining a web site to young adults and kids required to take a “computer” class. In the case of required training, the students often really need to understand what I’m teaching. Maybe they need to keep their jobs or they want to get a new one. Whatever it is, the stakes are often high. And yet, they’re not necessarily motivated to learn. Or they don’t have the prerequisite knowledge to learn what I’m now teaching them. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I’ll have students who are required to take a class, but it’s not graded or doesn’t “count” or some such. In other words, the stakes are really low. Sometimes these actually turn out well, if I can find something that will tap into their interests. However, if I can’t find a way to connect what I’m teaching with what these students want or need, then it’s often a lost cause.

I’ve liked computers since I was about 12 when I got Pong. I learned a little bit of BASIC in 7th grade, but mostly I play Haunted House (on a Tandy) and Lemonade Stand (on an Apple). I took a CS class in college (BASIC again). After years of pursuing an English degree, I landed in a tech job, having to learn most of what I needed to know on my own. I’ve continued to move deeper into teaching computing and now teach CS. I’ve run into people like myself teaching in K-12 schools. We are what one might call tech gurus, but we were never formally trained programmers. Some of us have worked as programmers or developers, but most of us have just learned from books or courses here and there. I learn primarily through practice, trying to program nearly every day, often setting myself increasingly difficult tasks. What I’m learning is that while those with full CS degrees can often tap into much of their past material, the field changes so quickly that everyone is almost always learning.

Falling off the (resolution) wagon

Laura — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 01:52:40 +0000

Yes, already. Things are still happening. I’m still doing stuff, but just not in quite the way I wanted. It’s amazing how much life gets in the way. Here are the things I’ve done consistently and/or that I’m target for this month:

1. Meal planning. The last two weeks, I’ve planned 3-4 meals. Last week, two of the meals were enough to feed us for at least two days. So far, so good. I’ve mostly been using AllRecipes to help with this process.

2. Reduce groceries and eating out spending by $100 each per month. I’m on target to do this in both categories. Item 1 helps with that, of course.

3. Reduce shopping spending by $100 per month. Shopping is everything that’s not essential–clothing, books, random fun things. I’m doing well here, even with some extra purchases. I’m going to come in well under my average.

4. I’ve put $500 into savings so far this month. So that’s good too.

Okay, now for the stuff I’m not doing so well on.

1. Decluttering. I could almost put this above, but my consistency sucks. We did the big declutter and I haven’t decluttered since. We have a guest staying with us, so . . . blah, there’s always an excuse. This weekend, I’m going to take the books I’ve culled to the bookstore to sell. That’s my goal.

2. Laundry. I was doing a load every day. This week fell apart. Between the decluttering, the robotics competition, parent evening, it just hasn’t happened. This is easy to pick back up again.

3. Yoga once a week. Sigh. The class I take is on Wednesday nights. Yesterday, I had a parent evening, and last week I got stuck at school until 6:30. I’ve signed up for a Saturday class.

4. Walk every day. So not happening.

5. Write a program every day. Sort of happening. But mostly because I teach programming. I need to be doing more.

What does this tell me? Some things are easier than others. When I’m busy, quite frankly, I’m less likely to spend money, so it’s easy to keep that up. Plus, I can check in with my spending and set a goal for each shopping trip. If I know I only have $200 left for the month to meet my goal, I can try to keep the total grocery bill below $100 or put off a clothing purchase until next month, both good things.

What seems to be the hardest are the things that essentially create a new routine for me. I think walking every day might be too large of a goal. Perhaps I could walk twice a week and work my way up to more. The decluttering every day shouldn’t be too bad, but like walking I can often find excuses for not doing it. Unlike walking, the thought of trying to reestablish that routine doesn’t seem too bad.

There’s another week and a half left this month. We’ll see where we are in 12 days.

Things people ask the tech person

Laura — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:31:10 +0000

What kind of computer should I get for my (parent/kid/aunt/me)?
Should my kid learn to type? Do you teach typing in tech class?
Do you teach (name your basic office application)?

That’s about it. Here’s what I wish people would ask:

What should I be doing to educate myself about the Internet?
What skills do you think kids should know to be prepare for jobs and college?
How young is too young to learn to program?
Is learning to program important?
Should my kid go online and if they do, what should they be doing (or not doing)?
My kid is interested in x technology field. How should they prepare? What things can they do?

Just another parent night. Not that the first few questions aren’t legitimate, but I wish that people would up the level of questions. And it may be that a) they were all tired (it was late after all) or b) I covered the answers. I do get some of those questions from parents of older kids, so maybe it’s just going to take them some time to realize they’re important.

The big declutter

Laura — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 02:23:48 +0000

Mr. Geeky putting in new floor

So the last few days, I didn’t get to my daily decluttering. At first, it was because I was recovering from the robotics tournament, but on Sunday, Mr. Geeky started a process we’d been talking about for months: moving the office to the attic. This was a multi-step process, involving first cleaning out the remainder of the kids’ stuff from their old rooms (which were in the finished attic) and then changing out the carpeting. So Mr. Geeky bought and put down some laminate flooring. Once that was done, he moved the office furniture in, and then we cleaned out the old office to make way for a small guest room and down the road, a bigger bathroom for our bedroom (which shares a wall with the old office).

One desk in the new office

Another desk in the new office

Still to be cleaned and decluttered

It was a big lesson in decluttering regularly. Years of stuff had accumulated. We found labels for 3 1/4″ floppies and for videotapes. There was fancy resume paper, old magazines, computer and gadget manuals. We’d just piled them up. So we threw out a lot. What we didn’t have time to make decisions about we put into bins and we’re determined to get them out this summer and go through them. It’s amazing how much crap we keep–because we think we might need it. But honestly, we couldn’t have found it if we needed it anyway. I had no idea we had disk labels! It’s still a work in progress, but we’re getting somewhere. I think I got all my decluttering in for at least a month.

We won (sort of)!

Laura — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 00:56:48 +0000

I’ve spent the whole day at our first official robotics competition. One of our teams ended up as part of the winning alliance of teams that won the tournament. In a way, they got lucky. Their robot was good, but was only capable of scoring so much and mostly could do defense. The teams they were grouped with had excellent robots. Serendipitously, the other two teams in their group were both all-girls’ teams, which I think was partly why they chose to work with our team. So yay, girls!

All our teams did fairly well, and I think they’re inspired to continue on and do better next time. I was really proud of all of them. When it comes down to the wire, the girls really do put forth a great effort. We’re all learning a lot!

Doing things that are hard

Laura — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 02:22:17 +0000

Jackie and I have been having a bit of back and forth via our blogs and Twitter about keeping up with our resolutions. She writes:

Newsflash: resolutions also often involve stopping doing things that are easy, and replacing with things that are hard.

Yep, yep, yep. Decluttering has been hard but I’ve managed to keep it up so far. The 15-minute limit helps. And I have missed a couple of days–yesterday, for one–but I’ve just kept it up, imagining the end goal of a house filled with less stuff that I don’t like or don’t need and more stuff that I enjoy and use. The thought of one day walking into my house and having it feel peaceful rather than crowded is keeping me going.

But walking . . . not so much. One, it’s cold, and two, well, I don’t know what two is. I just don’t want to do it. Exercise is hard for me. I can find forty million reasons I don’t like it and only one reason I do. The one reason is that I know I’d look and feel better if I did it. But unlike the thought of a clean house, that’s not enough to motivate me. With the house, I feel somewhat sure that I will achieve that goal, if not completely, at least enough to feel like I accomplished something. With my body, I just don’t trust that adding a small bit of exercise is going to help. And did I mention I find it hard?

This whole idea got me to thinking about my students, specifically my middle school students. Some of them give up when things get hard. When it takes effort for them to wrap their head around something, they will often give up. I wrote a little about this before. Honestly, I know how they feel. I mean, there are things I can’t motivate myself to do. And I’ve been frustrated by many things in the past. As an adult, when I’m learning new things, I know that perseverance usually pays off eventually. But even as an adult, I know that it’s more fun to watch tv than walk, even if it’s only for a little while.

So I’m struggling to figure out ways to motivate my students. Maybe a time-limit thing. Maybe saying, “Okay, working on the robotic arm is hard, but work on it for x minutes and then take a break.” I don’t know. All I know is that some students just can’t find the fire in their bellies to forge ahead and I’m not entirely sure how to ignite it. If I figure it out, maybe it will help me as well.

The Work Ethic is Dead

Laura — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 01:13:07 +0000

At least for today. I put in 11 hours today. I barely have brain cells left. I think, but I’m not sure, that I made it to the bathroom at some point. I sat down for the first time at 3:00 p.m. Thankfully, these days are few and far between.

Reading list

Laura — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 01:36:49 +0000

I need a reading list. I’ve read some weird things lately. The Big Roads, for one, which I liked and I like that genre of book. I’d love some books like the one to the left, which came across my radar this morning. I like reading about how people learn. I’m not much of a fiction reader, really. I prefer non-fiction, but I’m open to fiction as an escape. So, any suggestions?

Stupid Protestant Work Ethic

Laura — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 23:13:22 +0000

At some point in my adult life, I began to work harder than I know I did as a teenager or even a college student. Some of this was by necessity. A 9-5 job is a very different commitment than 4 or 5 classes in college. Even though I have worked at “real jobs” since I was 14, I approach work differently than I did then. Those jobs were just jobs. Now I feel a level of investment in my work that makes me put a lot more effort into it. At all of my jobs for the last 15 years or so, I have really cared about doing a good job, not so much because I wanted to get promoted or whatever, but because, as an educator, I knew people depended on me. I’ve sought ways of improving what I do: by going to conferences, by talking to experienced colleagues, or by reading books. I’m also often asking myself what more I could be doing to make wherever I work a better place. I put a lot into my work. As a result, I usually get a lot out of it, too. I feel good about what I’m doing.

However, that kind of cycle of constantly looking for things to do better or more of has the potential to burn me out. And so, I don’t take work home (much). When I come home, I may read a blog or article on education, but I don’t grade or prepare for class or check email. I leave work at work. For my own sanity, this is how it needs to be. And yet, I sometimes feel guilty. I know colleagues who take their work home. I feel guilty that I don’t. But as another colleague was telling me, we need to step away from work. It makes us better able to cope the next day if we’ve spent some time relaxing, being with our families and not thinking about work. And so, I try to put the guilt away, rest, reconnect so that I have the physical and emotional energy I need to do my best at work.

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