Where have I been?

As some of you may have noticed, I have gone missing in action in this blog. Why? Well, it’s because I’ve been busy with several commitments. The commitment that has most distracted me from posting to the blog has been my teaching gig at Aims Community College. Last year I was asked to teach a 4-credit C++ class in the Computer Science department and I agreed to do it. It’s one of the most challenging classes offered by the department, and so I was honored that they thought I’d be able to teach it. Like many people, I was curious to see what it would be like to teach a class at a local college.

If you want to get a sample of the class, you can find the example programs, assignments, and quizzes here. That web page doesn’t describe the entire class, but it does give you a sense of what’s required to pass it. In addition to that class, I also took a 4-credit class in Java. So between the teaching C++ and taking the Java class, it ate up about half of my time but I found that teaching a class was far more work than taking a class. I also have a few engineering consulting clients who took up the rest of my time.

While I was engaged in teaching the class, I felt a bit guilty about posting to this blog because when you teach, you’re never truly caught up with your teaching duties. I think this is particularly true when are teaching a class for the first time. There’s always more work you can do to improve your next lecture, or design the next set of examples or quizzes. There’s also the time you need to get the quizzes and programs graded, as well as helping students debug their programs. Even if you’re caught up on those things, you can still be engaged in improving your understanding of the material you’re teaching. I am also a tutor for two additional classes, one in Javascript and another in PHP/MySQL. I’ve been doing that for the past few years to help people who have trouble understanding the material to get over the challenging spots and that took up some time. The tutoring commitment should end tomorrow.

So you may have noticed that nothing new has appeared here in a few months. But today I delivered my last lecture in the C++ class and I have just one final responsibility for that class, namely to administer the final exam, which will happen on Thursday, May 5th, and after that I promise that I will have a more regular update of this blog.