Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Final CSS Class
I am writing this entry just as I have given my CSS/DHTML class their questions for the exam. Now I finally know what it is like to be on the other side of an exam – certainly preferably to doing the exam. ;-) Having said that, I’ve done my best to make the questions not too hard. As I told Erika last night over dinner – they’re actually relatively easy, but a couple of them require a bit of thought, and once you’ve figured it out, it shouldn’t take too long to do. One of the three questions (the students only have to do two) is straightforward, but because it has a lot of elements, may take some time. The other two are trickier, but are once you figure it out, shouldn’t be too hard. I guess I’ll soon find out.

I’ve enjoyed teaching this class. I’ve sweated blood at times worrying as to whether or not I had enough material to cover 6 three-hour classes with CSS and DHTML that I think people would find actually useful. Have just now had a chance to look over the course evaluation forms, and am pleased to see that on the whole, everybody got something out of it. Here are a few favourite quotes:

Extremely pleasant and very helpful. Took time to fully explain problems encountered.

Keith is well-spoken and very knowledgeable – he ‘wrote the book [on CSS]’.

Difficult subject matter to teach but I learned a lot. [He is] very knowledgeable

On the negative side, a couple of people didn’t find the assignments challenging enough, and if I do this again I think I will go more “hard core” with the in-class examples as well as the assignments. In general the facilities for the class got rated as “Fair”, which is more than I personally would have given them: old, slow NT 4 boxes with an Internet connection speed that made for long waits – excruciating at times when doing demos. I dearly hope that the machines in this lab are revamped soon.

There’s a space on the form for suggesting other course ideas, and I was pleased to see that “PHP” came up a couple of times as a suggestion for a future course, because this is something I have proposed teaching next semester. Other suggestions included: “Metadata”, “Digital Libraries”, “Advanced Flash” and “Advanced PhotoShop for the Web”. I could certainly do the last one, but the rest are not up my alley.

There is no guarantee that there will be a follow-up to this course – I got the distinct impression from the head of the FIS’ Continuing Ed that this course might not be renewed come the Fall. Apparently there’s the idea floating around that people tend to be attracted to being taught a subject – like HTML or CSS – around a particular application, that is “hot”, like Dreamweaver. I could certainly teach this course using DW instead of the HomeSite, which is admittedly looking a bit long in the tooth these days, but the focus of the course is not the program, but the code. I have also made an initial pitch to teach a PHP/MySQL course, and will have to see how that one pans out as well. I may even be able to do an intro Linux course, but I won’t pitch that idea until I see how the other two work out.

Day 2 of Red Hat Intro Class
Things got harder today. Yesterday I dealt with wholly familiar concepts and many commands that I had used before, and the instructor was really just putting everything together for me – so I had lots of “ah, so that’s how it works” moments. Today there are a plenty of novel ideas and concepts. It’s not more than I can get my head around, but admittedly it’s got me worried as to how much I’m going to have to remember when (if?) I come to taking the RHCT course next week.

Note to self: must read up further on all of the values that can be used with the find command. It’s more powerful and flexible than I had first thought, and obviously something I ought to bone up on.

Over the course of the day we covered users/groups and the Linux security model, understanding and how to set file permissions, creating archives, using links, using find and the finer points of using the bash shell. A good, solid class.

Lunchtime food was some pretty tasteless veggie lasagna. Blech. I ate it primarily because I had already paid for it .

Day 2 of Red Hat Intro Class
Things got harder today. Yesterday I dealt with wholly familiar concepts and many commands that I had used before, and the instructor was really just putting everything together for me – so I had lots of “ah, so that’s how it works” moments. Today there are a plenty of novel ideas and concepts. It’s not more than I can get my head around, but admittedly it’s got me worried as to how much I’m going to have to remember when (if?) I come to taking the RHCT course next week.

Note to self: must read up further on all of the values that can be used with the find command. It’s more powerful and flexible than I had first thought.

Over the course of the day we covered users/groups and the Linux security model, understanding and how to set file permissions, creating archives, using links, using find and the finer points of using the bash shell. A good, solid class.

Lunchtime food was some pretty tasteless veggie lasagna. Blech. I ate it primarily because I had already paid for it .