[rim] Teachin'

[Will Holcomb]

Well, I had my first real night of teaching tonight.

French freakin' sucks.

Any of you who have ever spoken to me might have noticed I have a
certain tendency toward distraction. Some people have minds like
bookshelves. There ideas are sorted in convenient little boxes that
they can take down, open and work with. I've got bookshelves except
they've been turned over, all the books dumped on the floor and then
gone over with a roto-tiller. The process for me is more so collecting
a handful of pages off the floor and trying to compose coherent
thought.

Normally I manage to keep things reasonably contained when I'm
teaching. I wander on tangents a bit, but I try to keep them really
close to the subject matter and only bring in things that will help
concrete the subject matter to the existing experience of the
students.

It turns out that I only have sufficient brain power to either control
my wandering of to speak French, but not both simultaneously. So long
as I don't think about the French I am fine and I can teach. Every so
often though I would run up against a word I didn't know and my
framework of ideas would completely crumble.

The worst was as I was explaining the conversion between decimal and
binary. French numbers are wretched creatures born out of some
masochists demented mind. Four is "quatre." Forty is "quarante." Five
is "cinq." Fifty is "cinquante." What do you think eighty is? Eight is
"huit." Think it might be "huitante?" You would if you were not
whatever inebriated Frenchman came up with their numbers, because it
is "quatre-vingts" ("four twenties"). Real fun is stuff like
ninety-nine (which happens to have been in one of the examples I had
to do) "quatre-vingts-dix-neuf" ("four twenties ten nine").

In this one Moussa had to come in and just take over since I was
spending so much time mangling the numbers it was completely obscuring
the idea I was trying to impart.

All in all I think teaching with Moussa will work out reasonably well.
He knows his stuff well enough. He lacks a certain forcefulness that
one must have in order to teach though. I went out of the room for a
bit to print something off and when I came back it looked sort of like
he was teaching except no one was looking at him. Everyone was turned
around looking at their monitors. His volume and tone were about what
one would use in conversation.

I listened to him for a bit and let him finish. All he had really done
was tell them to read their materials. So, I went in and covered the
same stuff but made them run programs and whatnot. Moussa seemed cool
going around and explaining things, just not being the leader. I
talked to him later and he seemed fine with how everything went down.
Granted I still am a little rusty on the cultural customs and he could
be plotting my death, but I think he is genuinely more comfortable
assisting than leading.

This is a good combo since I generally like leading and running a
class. The only problem is that I've got to freakin' do it in French
which renders me a step up from gibbering moron. Eh, ça va. It's going
to be an interesting semester.

Love,
Will