Today I delivered my second lecture to the 40 wonderful students of year one. The topic was Data Structures and ArrayLists, but it began with this slide:
and a discussion about the Word of the Day: Responsibility. The Y1s are just 15 years old, and have not yet learned how to clean up after themselves. So I claimed the task of mentioning the meaning of "responsibility", and encouraging them to throw away their trash so I don't have to.
Having covered responsibility, I proceeded to ArrayLists. Alice was kind enough to snap some pictures of me lecturing, further proof that I DO exist, and that I actually AM teaching. Check out this gesture as I talk about iterating through the ArrayList elements:
Towards the end, we had an interactive example with a BuddyList and Buddies, including some spontaneous clapping. This completely balanced out the fact that a student on the front row fell asleep during the lecture (not my fault... I hope).
Bassem and his new pal have been the low point of the day for the kids; Java makes them much happier. However, today things took a turn for the better as the kids spent a large portion of thieir time juggling.
Liel
Salam
General Chaos
Or balancing balls on their faces:
Lama
Even instructors and staff were juggling:
Alice
Mustafa
(not quite successful in this shot...)
Mustafa
(not quite successful in this shot...)
About half of our students can juggle, but all of the instructors can juggle. This further cements our status as incredibly awesome in their minds.
Post-juggling, and post-tales-about-magnets, we enjoyed sandwiches outside on a grassy lawn of Hebrew University. I managed to get all the kids in my recitation to sit together (plus a few stragglers), and we played a singing game which Lama called "Superstar". A person sings a line or two from a song, and the next person must sing a line from a different song which begins with the same letter as the end of the previous song. For example: "When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are" could be followed by "Everybody, rock your body" which could be followed by "Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away." It was quite interesting to see how many English songs these kids know, and also how even the shyest of the shy can overcome their inhibitions in the proper situations.
During recitation, we reviewed concepts from lecture, and then went through a long example with an ArrayList. One of the things I like most about teaching these kids is that I can convince them to do some kind of ridiculous things. Like barking. We created a list that held three different dogs, and then had a for loop iterate through the elements. Three students represented the dogs, and when Java called a bark() method on them, they barked. Heehee. :-)
The lab today was challenging, and few (if any) students completed it. In the first part, they created a shopping list, and calculated the total quantity and total price of their items. In the second part, they created a deck of cards, and then shuffled the deck. Much concentration was required.
I also got a nice Froy-helping-a-student shot:
En route to the busses, I walked amidst a large flock of Y1 sheep. I noticed that two of my sheep seemed to be a bit connected. And then I noticed that of my connected sheep, one was Israeli and one was Palestinian. Love knows no boundaries.
Because we enjoy making fools of ourselves, and because we all throw footballs far better than the MIT stereotype might suggest, a rousing game of non dominant football took place. The righties became lefties; the lefties became righties; the ambidextrous observed without participating.
For my end-of-the-day photographic pleasure, Abeer and Mustafa decided to coordinate their outfits.
Following the end-of-day meeting, it was back to the apartment for work and/or blogging.
Quote of the Day: "I hate you ... toilet paper ... hee hee ... hey we're not that
different after all" -Ted
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