Education
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Fear is Not an Acceptable Excuse
→: Fear is Not an Acceptable ExcuseIn the aftermath of my decision to quit grad school, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and seeking out advice. I called Julie from Escape the Ivory Tower, and we talked about whether it was possible to write a thesis alone, and my fear that if I switched schools I would just fail again,…
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Why I’m Not a Teacher
→: Why I’m Not a TeacherThere was a interesting post on the Computing Education blog about a month ago, suggesting that the best hope for CS education was to take existing teachers and train them to teach CS, rather than to try and get CS majors into teaching (you can find it here, there’s also good discussion in the comments).…
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An Overarching Theme
→: An Overarching ThemeI feel tremendously fortunate that when I write something I’m hesitant to hit “post” on, people leave these amazing comments that make me feel like less of a failure and like whatever it was I wrote, was worth sharing. Having a crisis about not finishing grad school, I wrote Being Human, and then Dropping Out when I came to…
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Dropping Out
→: Dropping OutI wrote the post Being Human at around 5am having stayed up most of the night to get my edits in for the deadline. I don’t normally work like that – I think I forgot to tell my co-supervisor I was in the UK. Oh well. I never really made it off Canadian time whilst…
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Being Human
→: Being HumanIt’s the day of my paper deadline, I have a horrible throat infection (complete with headache and rasping cough) and I’m just FREAKING OUT because it all seems like TOO MUCH and why why why did I not just hole myself up in my apartment and get on with things? Why did I come back…
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School is Not Life
→: School is Not LifeThe biggest difference I see between the education system here and in the UK is grading, and that creates some interesting differences in perspective. In Canada, marks in the 90’s are commonplace. I actually got a 99 on one of my assignments – I was dying to know what caused the loss of a point,…
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Books to Read Before You Graduate: Design Patterns
→: Books to Read Before You Graduate: Design PatternsDesign Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software – I had to read and study this for a class, and then we played Design Pattern Poker, where we “played” the design patterns we had in order to solve a problem. Seemed like nonsense at first, but then I read the book. And saw solutions that I’d…
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Building, Not Destroying
→: Building, Not DestroyingWhen I was 5 or 6, the school thought I had learning difficulties because I couldn’t read. It transpired that it wasn’t so much couldn’t – as wouldn’t. I refused to read the nonsense little books about Little Jonny Red Hat. Clearly my aversion to things that I find pointless started at a young age. Once…
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Experimenting with a Visual, Activity-Based Curriculum
→: Experimenting with a Visual, Activity-Based CurriculumWhen I left Ottawa, I had to find the new me to run my Processing Workshop. His name is Ali and he’s awesome. He’s had the idea to write up the ideas into a paper, so we’re working on that at the moment, but it occurred to me that I didn’t write much about it…