Day one of classes, Spring 2025 (#1328)

Topics/tags: Autobiographical

Today was my first day of classes for Spring 2025. It wasn’t Grinnell’s first day of classes. That was yesterday. I only teach on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, so today was my first day. This is an interesting semester. I have three classes, each 80 minutes per day (3x80, in my parlance). But they’re all sections of CSC-151, so I only have one prep. That’s nice. The last time I taught three sections of CSC-151, at least two were over-enrolled, so I had something like 76 students total [1]. This semester, there’s less demand on CSC-151, so I presently have only 52 or 53 (things are still shifting). One cool thing about the decreased demand is that I have a bunch of 3rd years and maybe even some fourth years. It’s nice to be able to teach a variety of students again.

I arrived on campus before 7:30 a.m. even though my class wasn’t until 8:30 a.m. Why? I knew that I had some last-minute tasks to do before class. Some I’d remembered, others I hadn’t thought about. I’m glad I gave myself time. What were those tasks?

I started the day by printing the pictorial class lists for myself and my class mentors. Why did I wait until today? Because there’s always some shuffling of students, and I find it best to wait until the last minute. I’ll likely print new copies on Friday and Monday.

Next up was one of the bigger tasks: Preparing for the legendary PB&J exercise, in which students provide instructions to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and I do my best to misinterpret any ambiguous instruction. I’d purchased most of the ingredients yesterday, but I need to assemble them into the box o’ supplies. This year, I decided to try making nut butter and banana sandwiches instead. Well, I decided to ask for instructions for making such sandwiches.

I wrote introductory material and the daily outline on the board. Ooh! Exciting. [2]

I put out course supplies (flashcards, gridded post-it notes, masks). People don’t often take these supplies, but I like to have them available.

I turned to my course notes to get my mind set for the class. And I quickly realized that I hadn’t set up my classroom workstation (or any of our Linux boxes) to work with the GitHub repo for the class. Panic! Since I rely on that repo to let me switch between course prep at home and course presentation in class, I had to remember how to do so. I’m fine on cloning repos. But I set up new branches rarely enough that I forgot how to attach a branch and look it up. Then I had to remember how to locally install [3] both Jekyll and the various Ruby tools the site depends on. It didn’t take all that long, but it did involve a bit of panic.

I found the stash of playing cards and set up the playing cards for creating groups. Another not-very-exciting task, but one I find useful. It can even spur some discussion of algorithms.

Finally, I set up the Teams meeting and started the Otter.ai recording. And I managed to get everything done before class started at 8:30 a.m. Yay me! I’m glad I permitted enough time.

Now the day is over. I met a lot of students who I look forward to teaching. I had fun failing to make sandwiches. I learned new things. Did you know that sunflower seed butter has oil on top, just like almond butter? I didn’t. I’m glad I was wearing an apron. I also failed to prompt any of my class mentors to say, Sam is unpleasantly snarky in the Apologies in advance portion of the course [4]. I made up for it by being unpleasantly snarky. After all, snark is love, misspelled.

What else? That’s about it. As I told my students, I’m only working at a fraction of my usual mental and emotional capacities. Nonetheless, I think things went okay. Of course, my fractional capacities mean that I might not have noticed if they didn’t.

Postscript: This musing was much less exciting than I expected. Oh well, you can’t win ’em all. Perhaps I need to rework the section about my sudden realization that I wasn’t ready to use the workstation so that it’s funnier. Or perhaps I should describe more of the sandwich interactions. For example,

Sam, can we assume that you know how to peel a banana?

It’s possible to peel a banana? So cool!

Fortunately, I didn’t have to try to eat the banana with the skin on [5].

Unfortunately, I don’t have the energy to go back and rewrite this musing. You’re stuck with what’s here.

Perhaps the next musing will be better. Or butter. (Nut butter.)

[1] The standard cap is 24.

[2] That was sarcastic. Could you tell?

[3] Split infinitives are your friend.

[4] I’m sorry that I can’t hear you well. I’m sorry that I’m bad at remembering names. I’m sorry that assorted parts of the Web site are broken. And, ideally, I’m sorry that snark is a core part of my personality.

[5] There’s an inside joke that should follow that comment, but I’l leave it to those in the know to make it.

Version 1.0 of 2025-01-22.