Getting up early
I had to get up early this morning for the traditional semester TA kickoff meeting. This meeting isn’t so much about getting things going for TAs as it is a way for the department to make sure that everyone is back on campus a few days ahead of time so that they will be available when classes start. The net wisdom I obtained from the meeting was the TSG had changed their policies for lab printers. If I print to a non-TA resource room printer, and release the job through the online web tool, I will be billed for the printout. Wow. That couldn’t have been communicated through an email.
On the upside, it forced me to get going to get a handle on some administrative stuff I’ve been avoiding. Did a little office hopping with more on the way. I’ve also spent some time this afternoon working on a “book” I’m writing for CS 105. It’s really just a written description of what we teach in lab. I’m going to pitch it to Prof. Woodbury this afternoon, and if I can get her buy-in, we’ll have the various TAs write some more sections for it and it should be rather useful. Best case scenario, in a semester or so, this document can replace the VBA book that we’re making the kids buy. It will save them some money, and we won’t have to deal with the different coding styles presented in VBA for Dummies (you know it’s quality programming eduction when it has ‘dummies’ in the title). Then maybe we can move on to an SQL book to replace the confusing book we have now. It’s not that bad of a book, honestly, but it gets into too much detail for what we teach. All of this is quite a bit of work, but I guess that’s the burden for caring.