Second semester retrospective (AY 23-24)

2024-05-03

The semester is wrapping up around now. This most recent one felt like a turning point in how far we can push our old tactics. Here are my notes on what worked, what didn't, and what needs to change next year.

What worked

• I rolled out my ITM grading center for the first time this semester. It seems like it was a great success. Our students were no longer dependent on me to give them feedback on their programming assignments. This relieved pressure both on me and on them.
• The command-line assignment still worked. Maybe not perfectly -- some students still couldn't figure out the command line when it came to writing an actual app. That just suggests to me that I need to go all in on the command line.
• Some of our old material still works. The top half of the classes this semester could still follow what we wanted them to learn, so at least we know that the material itself hasn't aged, only its form.

What didn't

• Evidently, the preference now is to go back onsite. Joben and I appear to be behind the times on this, but due to our other responsibilities to the school and to our external clients, this is not a movement we can accommodate.
• We also don't hold lectures that often, mostly because there isn't much we can do with those, anyway. The material just doesn't lend itself to being lectured about. One compromise I think will be easy to make here is to hold "office hours" instead of lectures.
• Some students just didn't submit assignments. Others just didn't use the Python website to check their work. I don't understand this. I believe that the claim is that they need hard deadlines to work. Maybe it's time to surrender this point.

What needs to change

• By far the biggest one: we need to fully (and I do mean fully) automate grading of formative assessments. Well, either that or make the formative assessment deliverables dead simple for us to grade. The worst offenders this semester were the diagram exercises for entities and relationships. It took so much time to grade those that I ended up not being able to deliver my aspiration of quick feedback. I can't let that happen again.
• The summative assessments truly need to be high-touch and high-stakes. Of course, they can be low frequency. I'm thinking about rolling out oral exams or some other observable performance exam to all the classes I teach.
• It might be time to re-impose hard deadlines. Too many students proctastinate until the last minute and get annihilated when they find out that there was actually quite a lot of work they needed to do. As much as I think that's their own problem (especially because we offer guideposts), it becomes our problem, too. I'm sick of dealing with it.
• It might also be time to bring back strictness. My English and Literature professor was great at this. If you didn't follow his instructions, even ones that you might find unimportant like skipping every line on a writing assignment, he would zero out your submission. We quickly learned not to fuck with him, ever. I thought it worked great, though I think some of my classmates from then would disagree.