My new school has a lab technician who is not me! This is exciting. It is also exciting that I have reasonably firm approval to teach introductory programming, and do it in Python rather than C.* Meaning I can make a Python install CD, show up, spend a certain amount of time showing the lab technician how to set Path variables in Windows and open a terminal to test the success of setting the variable, and then leave, because I have important things to do at home like make cookies. Not only do I not have to do all the lab work myself, I actually taught someone something about doing things to the lab computers, which is so much better than at the college, where the people who claimed they would "work together with" and "learn from" me had a tendency to answer their phones at the beginning of the process and then disappear for hours. Though as a side note, that a lab tech doesn't know how to open a terminal terrifies me ever so slightly. I accept this to a certain extant from even American undergrads, who know nothing of their computers except how to get online and possibly some word processing. But a lab tech?? What do they teach in schools these days, grumble grumble. Or I guess actually those days, since, like most teachers and some students, the lab tech is older than I am. Still, in my day, all we had were terminals and ASCII art games! Windows 3.1 even was a thing of the future. Get off my lawn, all ye who rely wholly on graphical things.
*Not that I have anything against C, in fact I think it is a delightful language. Everyone should know at least the basics, but for beginning programmers, I think Python is easier and more fun.
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