Week 1, day 2: coyote teaching
Left General Assembly tonight as they were cleaning up and fixing to kick us out. But I finished the evening assignment and was able to help others!
Had lots of little celebratory moments along the way—marking the small victories.
I find my college course in C (which I reviewed a bit this spring) has given me a nice, solid understanding of programming fundamentals. This means I want to quibble when an instructor says JavaScript .random produces a “random” number and explain the necessarily pseudo-random nature of that value. Also I want us to talk about the perils of floating point numbers.
I’m having trouble figuring out how far to explore questions. Like I know how to make a new object/hash and populate it with keys-value pairs, but if you use the terminology of “object literal” I am going to ask you what you mean by the “literal” part. Or at least what you’re contesting it to.
With students at such different levels at this point, I know it’s really tricky. Hopefully I’ll sync up with the instructors better soon. I feel like I keep talking past them.
So, frustrations with how we’re covering stuff I sort of know, but I’m certainly being challenged by the coding exercises.
Coming off of a few years tutoring beginning computer users I feel well-equipped to coach and coax other folks through the material I kind of know. One of tonight’s ad hoc tutees said in wilderness/outdoor training they call it “coyote style” or something like that. Dangling a clue in front of someone instead of just telling them what is going on.
Also, I found the snack stash. Some solid accomplishments for the day. I’ll back at it in less than 12 hours. Sweet!