This semester I’ve been hired to TA for CS 159, C programming for engineers. It’s been my first ever teaching expereince and it’s gone great so far! I have 27 students in my lab and I basically coach them through their lab assignments and grade about 40% of their coursework. They had their lab practical (midterm) last week and I just graded it yesterday evening. It was an incredibly hard assignment! In two hours, without any advanced knowledge of the task, the students had to write a program that would accept a year, month, and day of the week and return the date of every-other week that the day of the week fell on.
Something like that would probably have taken me an hour to write simply because of the conceptual aspects (including the leap year algorithm which I would probably have had to look up). The students had two hours to write the lab and many of them didn’t even half way finish. It’s sad but this is the kind of stuff that happens at Purdue because of grade inflation. Especially in freshman classes, tests are made incredibly and illogically hard to ensure that only the top one or two percent can achieve A’s.
I’ve always thought of myself as being someone who would joke around in this kind of situation (probably because that’s how I give PLUG presentations) but I’ve noticed I’m pretty stern when it comes to my lab section. I guess it would help if I could present my own material. Maybe next year I will losen up a bit.
I love teaching and helping people program. Probably my worst case career option right (say if Dell fell through) now would be high school programming teacher and even that wouldn’t be so bad.
- None Found