Schinckel.net

I learned programming originally, I think, on an Apple //. We had some of these at my primary school, and I clearly remember doing something like programming, even if it was only Logo, in class time. Or perhaps it wasn’t in class time, but at lunch and recess. I had a C=128 at home, and did lots of programming in Commodore Basic, most notably the more advanced basic that they shipped with the 128. Very little of the stuff was to do with peeks and pokes, but there was a little of this more assembly-level stuff.

At high school we did some programming, I think, on the BBC micros. I’ll have to check with the two guys I still keep in contact with, on WoW of all places, but I remember doing some programming on the machines at my first high school.

When I went away to boarding school I ‘moved on’ from computer programming in some senses, and went more into the hard sciences and mathematics. I think a big part of this was me not having any respect for (a) the machines we were forced to use in IT, and (b) the teacher we had for IT, who we also had for Religious Education. (!)

In actuality, I failed year 10 IT. Not because it was hard, but because it was easy. I did all of the work, and then gave it to the girls I fancied to hand in. (Hi Catie, Moose and co!) This wasn’t programming at all, but using computer applications. The stuff that is really boring. Learning how to use Excel, Word and the like. And, note, this was pre-windows.

During this phase, I was into Amiga. I didn’t actually have one, I still only had the C128D, I think. We had a choice between the BBC micros and the dodgy XT PCs. Both of which were limited to monochrome screens. I was, in the boarding house, barely living with the glory (!) of 256 colours, while my friends at home were basking in 4096 colours. And at school, the dull orange on black of the PCs.

I think I got an Amiga 500 while I was still at school. It was awesome, and I loved it. Games were much better on it, and it had a real windowed operating system, that actually multitasked better back then with a slow CPU and 512k of memory than the much more powerful machines in my lab pool do with Windows XP.

My learning of different computer programming languages began in earnest when I started University. Finally, I had proper instruction in several languages, and I was first forced to learn Pascal. We were taught using Turbo Pascal on the PC lab at Uni, but I think I downloaded and installed a pascal compiler on the VAX/VMS terminals we also had access to, but everyone only used for email. I used them for reading usenet, and learning how to push the limits of what the sysadmins allowed us to do.

Second semester of Uni was better – we did C. Finally, a real language. Again, Borland was the platform of choice, but I was different. As well as using the VAX/VMS machines, I managed to get myself an account on the Unix server, lux. I didn’t bother attending lectures (the room wasn’t large enough for all of the students, the lecturer wasn’t a good communicator), and I got enough out of the tutorials.

I submitted all of my work to the tutor via email, and obtained, IIRC, 97% for the subject. I think he was impressed that the rest of the drones were using Turbo C, and I was doing it the real way.

All of this coding was done without a windowing environment. Even though I had a lux account, I wasn’t allowed to actually go into the lab that had the X-Windows terminals in it. I did spend a bit of time in at Adelaide Uni, and got some exposure to X-Windows there, but not much.

Third semester, and things started to go a bit shaky for me. The programming subject was called “Data Structures in Pascal”, and I must say I wasn’t so keen on diving back into this toy language. I got hold of the C++ books for the second semester, and started teaching myself a bit of this.

However, all good things come to a close, and with my rather poor performance overall, I was forced to choose something else to do.

After a couple of years, I came across python. I don’t think it was even while I was still at Uni – I think it was something I picked up on my own while teaching. I do remember printing out all of the 1.5.2 documentation (I think I still have it in a filing cabinet somewhere). I may have started while at Uni in my Education degree, I can’t recall.

I’m feeling pretty down today. Which really annoys me, because I have a Touch Football tournament on this weekend, and I’d love to be able to really focus on that, and prepare. At least I will have plenty of motivation to go hard, though.

See, my Year 12 IT Studies kids are supposed to be handing in work, or have handed it in already. I have to submit my results to SSABSA tomorrow, and at this stage I don’t have anything that even slightly resembles a full marks book.

I have found this to be the worst aspect of teaching. Trying to get all of the required work from a cohort of students.

It makes me feel like a bad teacher. Why can’t I manage to get all of the students, or even a majority of them, to submit all of the required tasks? Am I doing something wrong? I know there are stacks of things I would approach from a different direction if I were teaching the subject again, or if I could do it over. But surely I m not single-handedly responsible for their lack of work.

Having had discussions with other teachers at my school makes me think not. One of the Maths teachers mentioned she had 3 out of 17 students who have submitted all of their tasks. A Science teacher had similar things to say of his class.

At some stage, students need to stand up and take responsibility for their own actions. Regardless of excuses they make (the computer network is down, or whatever), I have continually reminded my class of the tasks they have not completed. And yet with some students, I have received no more than 20% of their assessable work. And these are the very same students who have not attended at all in the “extra week” I have put on for them, since I was absent all of last week.

Perhaps I just need to go “fuck it”, and hand out a whole bunch of failing grades.

Of course, that would only result in me getting hauled through the admin team’s offices, wanting to know why so many students scored so badly. So I spend countless hours giving students way more help than I would really like, and quite a few of my website projects look fairly similar.

Stiff shit. I’m over this whole thing. I am just killing days until the year finishes.

As of midnight this morning (or last night, if you prefer), all smoking is prohibited inside in South Australian hotels and clubs. This is a great step – as someone who is not a smoker, it’s nice to be able to go anywhere and drink myself into a stupor without having to worry about lung cancer. This is a follow-on from the previous laws, where it was illegal to smoke in certain areas in pubs. For instance, there was always at least one “smoke free” bar in any licensed establishment, and if there was only one bar, smoking was prohibited within 1m of that bar.

Of course, there is one side-effect of the new laws, which I noticed before work this morning.

Where do all of the smokers go when they can’t stay inside and smoke? Outside on the footpath, of course. Normally this wouldn’t bother me too much, but down Hindley Street there are several pubs, and each one had a cloud of smoke and a cloud of smokers outside of them. That I had to pass through as I strolled to work.