Flashes of Panic

See Jane Compute has started what she promises will be a “miniseries” on teaching computer science, with Teaching the intro courses. Tomorrow is the first day of classes here, and my first TA meeting for my second semester on our intro course, so it’s good for me to read things like this:

The biggest challenges I have at this level are (a) maintaining everyone’s interest in the material, without losing or boring anyone along the way; (b) making sure that the lesser-prepared students aren’t intimidated by the blowhards (many of whom really have sub-standard skills, but they know the lingo and they know how to sling it around); (c) introducing an overwhelming number of concepts in the first several weeks, and making sense out of them; (d) making sure that at the end of the class, everyone has some baseline skill in programming a computer.

There’s nothing like having the goals plainly laid out. I think (b) and (c) will probably be the ones that most come into my view, but (a) might pop up some as well. I hope we can do a better job than we did in the fall.