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So I had a very nice leisurely lecture prepared that talked about the stack, buffer overflow attacks, and C varargs functions. We were going to do a few different activities and maybe even a live coding exercise which I’ve been wanting to try. Then I get an email from my practicum professor saying he wants to cover the stack, C I/O, Buffer overflow attacks, varargs functions, and malloc all in one class session – less than a day before I’m scheduled to speak. That’s over 50 unplanned slides worth of material, jammed into a 90 minute session that already felt a bit disjointed.

I was not feeling the love at that moment.

But what the heck. I figured this would be the sort of real world teaching experience I had been warned about.

Here’s what I did:

• Eliminated some of my more time-intensive exercises, or replaced them with quicker versions
• Cut a variety of content that I felt was less important, and distributed it as handouts + an instruction to read the book
• Created my “exploding kitten” exercise, designed to let me move through the malloc material slight faster. Basically I labeled certain slides with numbered kittens, and as I moved through the students had to record what deadly malloc error each kitten referred to. The idea here was that students would pay extra attention when they saw a kitten, and would know if they missed something so I could go back to it.

All this and I still had to end only 1/3 of the way through malloc.

So looking over my video after the fact, I felt confident that I had completely screwed everything up. But , everything was pretty positive. Most common negative feedback: too much material and too fast. I can’t say I disagree.

Here’s the handouts, the powerpoint for the first part, the powerpoint for the second part.

You can watch me here: (part 1) (part 2) if you’re curious.

So it looks like I’ll be spending 6 weeks of my summer at Georgia’s Governor’s Honors Program (GHP). Students get assigned to a major and minor and basically get 6 weeks of super-intense boarding school. They apply for this, and some don’t make the cut.

I’m looking forward to GHP. I’m looking forward to the chance to teach a completely different group of students. This is kind of class teachers dream about – intelligent, motivated, naive enough to believe your lies. The CS classes will be in the context of a mathematics curriculum which I suspect will present its own challenges. I’m also looking forward to hanging out with a group of professors who would sacrifice 6 weeks of their summer to live on-site and get paid not much. That I think will make for some awesome lunch discussions.

A third perk is the opportunity to teach “seminars”. These are short evening classes that basically can be about anything you can convince a few students to come by and hear about. I’m hoping to use this to try out all the wacky neat-o technologies and techniques I never have an excuse to inflict on the students. I’m already thinking of dusting off my Big O and P/NP lectures. Why? Because I am insane. Maybe also one on Kodu, a super easy game framework by Microsoft that may have little pedagogical purpose but there is something to be said for making a game in 5 minutes using only an xbox controller. And perhaps something with microcontrollers…who knows?

What about you blog-reading people? What fun thing would you just like to inflict on a bunch of high school students? Group theory? Celluar Automata? I am all ears.

For you Seattle-ites: when I’m not tormenting the youth of Georgia, I plan to be in Ben’s place once again living like a drifter. A drifter with a unwavering, ninja-like focus on writing his proposal. But this drifter would not mind grabbing a coffee or drink with any old friends who happen to be out in his direction. I’ll be there from early May to mid-June.