March 22, 2007
A frustrating day in the life...
Well, the evening went better, but the morning stank. First, I overslept my alarm and didn't get up until just after 10, so I didn't have time to do anything but print out my syllabi and rush to class. Fortunately, I'd prepped out my examples last night, but I was meaning to read them over and make sure all the software in the lab was set up right, before class started. Ah well. Class itself went fine, I guess, although I didn't cover as much as I'd planned. Fortunately, I hadn't printed out the homework yet, so I was able to edit it and remove the stuff we hadn't gotten to.
Then it was lunchtime. I'm still used to the crazy amount of time I had last term, when I was teaching 2-6 (I'm doing 3-6 this term), and so I didn't even get to lunch until the beginning of 5th. Got back to my office, checked email, and then as I was going to print out the labs, I noticed that I'd never finished editing them from the previous term's version. Ended up cutting the second half of the lab handout entirely, giving them the first half of the lab, and then setting everything up while they did that so that I could wing it through a lecture on the java compiler and unit testing, so they could do the second half of the lab. And then I forgot to tell them how to set up their CLASSPATH (it's a ... no, nevermind, it doesn't even matter), so I had to type it in on the projector and then tell them how to do it themselves, reading off words like "tcshrc" and generally making a hash of the part of lab that goes pretty well when they actually see it all written on a piece of paper in front of them.
Argh!
Then I went home and took a nap, taught my ballroomers how to to a cuban walk and a tango open left turn, grabbed coffee, got distracted into a long (though excellent) conversation with a few of them in the Gizmo, and now I'm back in my office, looking at what will be my fourth night in a row of working here past midnight.
That said, I do get a lot of work done when I do this. So maybe it's not so bad....
You and I will someday win
'Cause no one owns the wind or sun. --Dan Berggren, "Power from above"
