Rare statement warning (and I’ll deny it if anyone ever quotes it back to me) but I have to say it: I have a bit of respect for marketing people that are forced to rely on slides for their livelihood. It’s not PowerPoint’s fault because I’ve got nothing against the application. I’m just so sick to death of making slides at the moment that I never want to see one again – trust me, I would even hate Keynote by now. And if one more piece of text randomly tries to FlyIn at me, without my telling it to, I’m tossing the ThinkPad into Starbucks’ sink.

It’s getting near class time again, you see, and that means work (and lots of it) as I get my class plan together. I start with making slides – 13 weeks worth – and building some examples for the in-class lessons. Only some examples. There are some “show and tell” pieces that make more sense when done on the fly and in class – which is how I like to teach anyway – but some examples are too large to type up in class, so those are prepared ahead of time. I do like the “ad hoc” method of teaching because then you get compile errors – working through some of those errors can teach more than what the actual lesson does, provided that the whole class isn’t spent finding a misplaced ;.

Then, once the slides, general class plan, and larger examples are set, I go in search of a book. Right now there’s a stack of seven books on my kitchen table – two from the University and five from my own library – that I have to go through.

Finding a book is always a problem. Think about when you were a student taking a language or platform class: didn’t the book always suck? I always thought so, even though I always bought it. I usually kept it around for “reference” and then went out looking for a “trade” book for additional help. And with MSDN online now, I doubt that I would even bother with the extra book – I’d just hit the MSDN pages and go from there. I just can’t justify using MSDN as my “lone” text, especially if students haven’t seen MSDN before. Consequently, I always try to find a good text book that is a balance between acedemia and trade expereience, which isn’t an easy thing to do.

A very nice thing for this particular class is that there are several hundred C# books on the market right now – so many so that I might even go with two books. Like Sells’ Windows Forms Programming in C# and Petzold’s Programming Windows with C# or even an O’Reilly Programming C# – something for Windows Forms and another for the language as a language. I could even go with other texts for advanced topics, like Makofsky’s Pocket PC Network Programming if a student wants to get that specific for their final project or a C# version 2 book, depending on the release date of VS.NET 2004.

[Off topic, did anyone else miss a memo that it’s not proper to underline book titles anymore and that the better syntax is to italicize them? I know I missed it – I only know about it from manuscript writing… it’s one of the rules that my publisher forced me to follow. Go figure.]

After the book is selected, I go through the slides and class plan again to match up chapters in the book versus the flow of the lessons – they never match one to one. And once that is done, it’s usually time for the first class, so I make one last update to the class policy and syllabus to make sure that they are current, and plan the class assignments which usually total five – one massive project that’s due on the last class and four smaller homework assignments.

Basically, for a thirteen week trimester, I spend the three months before it mapping out the entire term, with a lot of “movable time” built into it to deal with certain eventualities. Like what happens if after the third class everyone is lost and the pace has to slow down? It can happen; I’ve been a student in such a class before! Or what happens if everyone in the class catches on quickly and we’re doing “week 10” in the 5th week of classes? That’s when you start to expand on things you tend to avoid (like printing!) because you don’t want to overload students every week but you also don’t want them to feel bored.

The only thing I never plan ahead of time is the single exam of the term – I do that a day or two before I give the exam to the class. It’s only then that I know what we’ve covered already and what the students are (and are not) confused about. I usually don’t feel it’s right to throw in a question on a topic that everyone in the class is confused about – what would be the point of that? Besides, this often drives my students nuts because they can’t ask me “what format is the exam in?” and “what’s on the exam?” I mean they can ask, but I tell them the truth: I have no idea! I also warn them that if they ask me that same question every week I could tell them one thing and when I make the exam, I’ll purposely change it to make it hard – that helps to take the curiosity out them! Most of them think I’m ducking the question, but it’s in their best interest that I don’t plan the exam ahead of time.

Right now I’m just sick of seeing PowerPoint and this made for a useful distraction. Another thing I’ll need a distraction from is figuring out what my hourly rate is for this endeavor, if I take the prep time into consideration… the truth is that I like teach almost as much as I like coding – it’s the luck of the draw that one pays better than the other… I’m just lucky that my foremost hobby (programming) makes for a good career, more often than not. I personally believe I’d be doing both things for nothing, if I had to make a living in an unrelated field (like pouring coffee at Starbucks). I would still keep them both on as “hobbies”, because I enjoy them… after all, I spend a lot of time on this site and none of it is with the intension of making money!

Thanks for listening – I’m much happier looking at SharpMT than I am looking at my slides right now!