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Revisit: How I organize the teaching staff of my 200+ student class

 When it comes to anyone’s advice on how to run your own course, your “mileage may vary.” So, I thought it would be interesting to revisit my series on how I organize my teaching staff in my 200+ student class . The first post of that series is my most viewed post on Medium. I published that series during the second half of 2020, and times have changed since then (**cough** pandemic **cough**). In addition, I’ve moved on from that introductory computer science (CS1), and I primarily teach an elective data science (DS) course, which has a high variability in enrollment. In this post, I revisit that series from the perspective of what I still do versus do not between my CS1 and DS courses. [ Also posted on medium. ] Current Course’s Context Before I start my comparison, I need to go over how the context is different since it influenced many of the differences between the two courses. My DS class has a semester-long project and no labs/discussions. The class also uses Python, which is wha
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Using My Calendar to Audit My Time (Calendar Time Management Part 4)

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So, first, I wrote about my general philosophy and mechanics of using my calendar for time management . Then, I introduced the idea of adding a one-hour, daily buffer event to allow some slack in my schedule . In the third post of this series, I discussed the usefulness of color to help visually see what kind of time commitments I have in a given week . For my final post of this series, I will give you my potentially oddest tactic: updating the calendar as time passes to reflect what actually happened. You can actually see it in the screenshot I shared in the last post about color . Updating my calendar as I go helps me mindfully notice where I spend my time so I can proactively alter course as needed while also serving as a quasi-log to better understand how I’m spending my time when I pause for a deeper historical reflection. [ Also posted on medium. ] To show more what I mean, here is a recent week before it actually happened. Note I have my calendars start on Mondays since the wee
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Color Coding for Clarity (Calendar Time Management, Part 3)

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For my third post on how I use my calendar as a tool to manage my time, I thought I’d write about something more fun: color! I color-code my calendar events to help me see what events are meetings and when I’m working on which project. Yes, that’s right even though my first post focused on how calendar events are all time commitments, that doesn’t mean I threw out the ability to quickly see my meetings! [ Also posted on medium .] Since a picture can help regardless of how many words I use, here is a blurred-out version of my calendar from a few weeks ago: Meetings events are bold colors To make it easy to see which of my events are meetings, I use dark or vibrant colors. Using this color coding, I can quickly scan my calendar to know what events are meetings that cannot move unless I coordinate with someone first. Versus what events are work sessions that I could potentially move around as needed. I do all of this using Google Calendar. If you have access to the enterprise version, wh
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Adding Flexibility with Buffer Times (Calendar Time Management, Part 2)

This is the second post of a series on how I use my calendar as a tool to manage my time. My first post focused on the basics where, to me, a calendar event means a time commitment, as opposed to just meetings, and by doing this, it visually shows how much of my time is already committed to things, and I don’t have much time to squeeze other things in. So, if you’ve ever felt like there just aren’t enough hours in the day, stick around. This post focuses on getting your hands on what is actually going on. I find my personal feelings of stress drastically reduce when I can actually see what is going on rather than just a feeling of impeding too much work and not enough time. [Also posted on medium .] This post focuses on a current experiment of a recurring one-hour daily weekday event for built-in buffer/slack in my schedule . As I mentioned in my prior post , I have a habit of seeing a gap in my calendar and filling it whenever possible. My brain assumes my estimates are perfect (they
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Using a Calendar for Better Time Management: What I do (Part 1)

 I use Trello to keep track of everything I have to do, as seen by my multiple blog posts on it (task tracking for a big class , personally , and a conference and a whole board about podcasts I listen to ). However, I also use my calendar to help me manage my time, so I actually get most of it done. I use my calendar to plan out when I will work on certain tasks and to force myself to actually recognize what is a reasonable task list. [Also posted on medium .] Confession time: I’ve always struggled with planning more tasks than I actually have time for. This is due to many of the usual suspects: not time-boxing strongly enough, having more tasks than will fit in a 40-hour work week, and the planning fallacy of underestimating how long something will take me. Over the years, I’ve fiddled, gotten rid of, and layered different strategies for managing my time and task list such that things are much less messy and I’m overworking myself less. And since reflection is useful, I decided to st
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Management skills, professors need them too

An underlying current in my blog post series on how I manage the teaching staff for my 200+ student CS1 class is that teaching large classes requires management skills. Notice I said skills because I fully believe we can all learn and improve how we manage people. The amount of effort required to learn a particular skill will, of course, vary. But that just means some of these may take work and require conscious effort to learn. Moreover, not all management techniques will work for you and the people you manage. [Also posted on medium .] I will say up front that I have no secret techniques for any of this. Most readers of this blog are also teachers, so you know there are few shortcuts to learning something. And these kinds of professional skills are rarely taught in academic settings, especially in preparation for becoming a professor. So instead, this blog post will focus on first my processes to learn new management ideas, skills, frameworks, and techniques. Then I'll go over s
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Hybrid Chair for SIGCSE TS 2023 (Round 2)

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Time for a reflection on being the Hybrid Experience chair for SIGCSE TS 2023, a.k.a. round 2! This year was so much more manageable in terms of time commitment. I also helped introduce new processes and aspects to the symposium. In this post, I will start with the new processes and structures and then talk about the time commitment since the latter section references things from the former section. [Also posted on  medium .] New Processes and Structures The most significant difference is rather than being a committee of one, I was part of a committee of four! Dela Yazdansepas was my junior Hybrid Experience Co-Chair. Jacqueline Smith was the Authors’ Corner chair and Jessica Yauney was the Online Experience chair. Spreading both the workload and the mental load was extremely helpful and reduced so much of the stress. In addition, three other things. The first was to create a Trello Workspace for the committee. You all know I love my Trello boards ( class Trello blog post , personal
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