We're back for Winter Term here at Knox and today is my first real day of classes. As usual, I'm just barely ready to go. I've got both courses outlined, the syllabi done and the first few lectures done. Need to work on homeworks and labs though - something that I am always late on.
It seems that I do a lot of research for each class; lots of surfing the web and finding resources and new ideas (especially like this term, when I'm teaching CS1) and then I focus in on an approach and most of my research ends up gathering figurative dust on my hard drive. Halfway through the course I'll stumble upon one of these gems and go "Geez, I should have used this!"
It also seems to be the case that I prepare a first lecture; create an exciting introduction to the class, and then I end up off on a tangent and that lecture gets half-delivered at best. Go figure.
Part of the problem with beginnings is that I have this ton of material to cover in a class, I've usually got several competing ideas on how to work through the material, and I have this desire to kind of spew it all out at once. This is particularly true in the Intro classes because there's always this "in order to do anything interesting we've got to learn these 47,000 things TODAY!" syndrome. It makes planning lectures and topic orderings a delicate art.
