Long Break

I do stupid things, and I will often be the first to admit it. Especially after a night of drinking. However, it is pretty rare that I enter into an activity with full knowledge of the vastness of my stupidity. This summer, I performed just such an activity: I started teaching. Why? I needed to pay rent, and my full time job hadn't started yet. This decision resulted in a few distinct outcomes:

1. No free time whatsoever (so no updates)
2. The money with which to pay rent
3. Pure frustration

I thought I had been frustrated before. This was before I asked a simple question to a class and received nothing but the blank stares of empty faces and emptier minds. This was before I had to explain the difference between equality comparison and assignment in programming. This was before I became known, for a brief period, as "Professor Bujerkee."

The STEP program is a very progressive program where my alma mater takes students from inner-city areas all around New Jersey and brings them to campus for 6 weeks. During this time, they take "college level classes." If they pass, they get to enroll as a student and admission  is guaranteed. However, if they fail, they're out. This basically gives them one chance to pull themselves up by their boot-straps and get the fuck out of the terrible areas they come from. These kids are not used to college, mentally challenging and frustrating work, or being in an environment populated by a bunch of weird white nerds. They have more issues than missing coursework.

My job: teach these kids computer science. Basic, not even three weeks into the actual class computer science. This was a challenge for them. However, this is not to say that they are stupid. This is just a concept that was completely alien to them. Thinking in the logic that is required from most computer science courses is foreign to most people. It is not math. It was I affectionately call "Incredible Bullshit Math" (aka IBM). The easiest comparison I can think of is this: In Calculus, you can perform many operations at once. In basic programming, you can do only one at a time. These small individual operations are what make programming. Lots of them.

Trying to get students to wrap their heads around this was hard. Me figuring out how to teach ( I didn't really get it down until the fourth week) was much like watching a dog trying to get out of a large blanket. I floundered around for a bit, made progress, lost a whole shitton of progress, the somehow miraculously managed to get out without any reason or knowledge of how I did it. However, it was exhausting.

Things I have learned from 6 weeks as a teacher:

1. Teaching is hard
2. Students are dicks
3. Some students are a lot of fun
4. Students are still dicks
5. The concept of a loop is like quantum physics
6. Showing the class two ways to do the same thing will confuse them all
7. Dry erase markers are stupidly expensive
8. Intelligence does not necessarily mean good grades
9. Girls have cooties. No one wanted to sit by them. I have no idea why this happened.