T-1.5M and counting

We are quickly approaching September 7th 2009. That is the first day of classes of 09/10 course in which the new totally redesigned, done from scratch, 180 degree change in strategy course I'm prepary will start. The amount of work is just enormous which together with the already large amount of things popping up (projects, research, thesis, etc.) makes this time of the year specially stressful.

But in the middle of the storm, there are still a few reflections worth mentioning. I'm tasting how does it feel to really prepare a course. To carefully think about the learning objectives (or outcomes), how to tie them to activities, how these need to be carefully dimensioned such that they don't turn into some mere impossible exercises courtesy of the wacky professor.

I now understand why is so difficult to teach a good course on technology. The level of planning you need is extreme. When setting the stage for a program that will, for example, dump a data structure in a file and then restore it (sorry for the not techies, this is the tough part), you need to make sure you have the rest of the details taken care of for students to focus only on that aspect of the activity. Of course, in your regular engineering life, you must take care of ALL the aspects, but activities in a course, at least a third semester course, still need a bit of narrowing the interest in order to achieve depth of understanding.

The course is shaping up nice, although orders of magnitude slower than expected (will, to be hones, it was expected). Yesterday, in an event totally unrelated to my techie life somebody told a story about a daughter asking her father what was an utopy. The father answered that it was something similar to the horizon. You keep chasing it, but it keeps escaping your. The daughter then asked, so then what is an utopy used for? And the father replied, to keep advancing. How timely! I'll try to remember the story the next time I have the tenth million argument about why should we change the way we teach.