We finished our three-day RDBMS/SQL programming course yesterday at MIT. It was a very satisfying experience for me and a great one for many students due to the heavy teacher-student ratio (this weblog was very helpful in attracting volunteers, another triumph for the Web!). I was pretty wiped out after three days of 10:00 am to 7:00 pm. It is easy to understand why lab courses aren’t more popular among computer science teachers. Consider how painful it is to debug your own code and then imagine a room full of 50 newbies pointing to 15 lines of rather bizarre SQL and asking “Why doesn’t it work?”
One funny moment was the student who showed up to the lab course without a laptop computer. In the old days, of course, it was not uncommon to show up and ask another student to borrow a pen. But a whole computer? Yet sure enough, another student pulled out a spare laptop, freshly installed with Ubuntu, and said “You can use this one.”
Michael Stonebraker gave an amazing 2-hour talk and question/answer session. Afterwards, my friend Avni gushed “That was fantastic. It made volunteering for all three days worth it.” When I complained about the implication that my own mini-lectures and solutions discussions were less than inspiring, she tried to make me feel better. Somehow this included saying “Wow, John [Morgan], you’re exactly half Philip’s age.”
Considering that students flew in from as far away as Indiana and San Francisco and almost unanimously said that it was worth the trip, I will check off the class as a pedagogical success. Fortunately we won’t be teaching this again for another year, so my ego will have a chance to heal…
Hi Phil
Yes, Stonebraker’s lecture alone was worth the trip. And with three days of heavy SQL writing with almost individual coaching it’s really hard to beat. I agree, your dog would have done a better job at explaining things 😉 (Just kidding). This was a high stress class, at least for someone like with no prior SQL experience and not a professional student. On Tuesday night I felt my brain was completely shut down but it recovered the next day.
Phil,
If you’re doing something like this again…and would like help…I do this for a living:
Travel the country, teach corporate programmers 1-5 day, 8-hour courses that are between 50 and 80% lab. I’m on the opposite side of the country, though.
Only in Boston, America that this is likely to happen.
Phil,
It was so enjoyable TAing the class. I and many other TAs are looking forward to coming back next year.
Paddy
I had a lot of fun as well, looking forward to being a part of it again.
Only computer science course I’ve ever been a part of with a border collie as a TA, also.
Spare Laptop Guy here. Thanks again to everyone involved (including Ollie, whose morale-boosting energy was instrumental in setting the tone for the course). Learning so much and collaborating with new friends made for one of my best vacations ever.
Kourt