TITLE: Ready for a Weekend
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 05, 2012  4:02 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
After a week in which I left the classroom one day feeling like
a pretty good teacher and and another day feeling like I'll
never get this teaching thing right, I was looking for some
inspiration.

While looking at a really simple blog this morning, I got to
thinking about writing some code for fun this weekend, something
I don't get to do very often these days.

Then came an e-mail exchange with
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2008-05.html#e2008-05-03T22_10_00.htm">
   a former student</A>
now thinking about computing
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2007-12.html#e2007-12-13T14_47_27.htm">
   in another field</A>.
He has interesting thoughts about how computing can reach people
doing real work in other disciplines, and how computing itself
needs to change in order to be relevant in a changing world.
It was just what I needed.  Some days, the student is the
teacher.  Other days, it's the former student.

This all brought to mind a passage from Mark Edmondson's <EM>Why
Read?</EM>:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
True teachers of literature become teachers because their lives
have been changed by reading.  They want to offer others the
same chance to be transformed.  "What we have loved, / Others
will love," says Wordsworth in <B>The Prelude</B>, "and we will
teach them how."
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

That's how I feel about programming.  I hope that most days my
students can sense that in the classroom.  It's good to know
that at least occasionally a student is transformed, and just
as often I am transformed again.
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