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On Mon, Nov 29, 1999 at 12:28:25PM -0500, Uri Guttman wrote:
> this last summer, i had a strange class situation. i was teaching mostly
> very young programmers many of which were from mit. but they were
> working in a killing floor environment with fires to put out every
> second. all i could schedule was an hour a day and attendance varied
> from 2-15! no continuity was possible so i would end up starting topics
> that half the students couldn't grok because they missed previous
> classes. also they weren't mandated to go (they should have been) so
> that made my class a maybe i will show up affair. 1 hour a day they
> couldn't spare. i only had a white board with no computers so i used a
> socartic method of asking them to solev problems or what does this code
> do? kinda stuff.
That's kind of how I started out. At the job I had before I started
Netizen full-time, I was the local Perl guru for a university computer
centre. The centre had people ranging from helpdesk kids to people
who'd been sysadminning for 20+ years.
Quite often, people would wander into my office and ask to be taught
some Perl stuff, either plain Perl or CGI or database things or
whatever. I'd grab a couple of markers and hit the whiteboard.
This computer centre also used a command-line chat facility called
goofey, and quite often I'd message a few other people saying "I've got an
impromptu Perl class going in here for the next hour, come on down if
you're interested".
Because of the range of knowledge and the variance in who'd been there
before and whatnot, I would have to do lots of back and forth. Ever
since then, I've found that writing something on the board like:
$foo = "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog";
m/(fox|wolf|lion).*(dog|cat)/
then saying "OK, what special variables get set as a result of this?"
can be good. Either people will know and call out the answers, or you
can pretend it was a rhetorical question and just tell them :)
(I mention this example because I'm sitting in a class supervising a new
trainer who's teaching this stuff right now)
Just getting an back-and-forth quiz going can be good, too, especially
because it teaches them to "speak" in Perl. For instance, on the regexp
topic still:
Q. OK, who knows how we match any digit?
A. backslash-dee
Q. And what does the matching operator act on by default?
A. dollar-underscore
Five minutes of this can be fun, wake everyone up a bit, etc. I usually
have wrapped candy to throw at people who answer correctly.
> it was my first major training experience and it was tough. i don't eny
> you full time trainers.
Does anyone here actually train *full* time? Me, I'm currently doing
training about 1/3 to 1/2, with the rest split between development,
documentation for development/systems things within Netizen, and
management.
Training can be pretty gruelling, but it's rewarding. We have this
slogan/motto/whatever, which is "make people clueder", and that's what I
try to do. Clue installation is a difficult but worthy cause.
K.
--
Kirrily Robert -- <[email protected]> -- http://netizen.com.au/
Internet and Open Source Development, Consulting and Training
Level 13, 500 Collins St, Melbourne VIC 3000
Phone: +61 3 9602 2452 Mobile: +61 419 119 429