I've been in something of a teaching funk for much of the semester. Don't get me wrong, I think things are going pretty well with the classes but I don't feel like I've had my "A game."

Part of it, I think is because of the relaxed mask policy. Hunter is masks optional and in their infinite wisdom, last year replaced the signs that said "Masks required" with signs that say "Masks NOT required." I'm in two overcrowded rooms - one of them, in fact has a capacity lower than my class size and I have some imunocompromised people in my life that I'd like to be able to safely see not to mention my own health. At the beginning of the semester, I requested for these reasons that in the classroom people wear masks. Most did and most do but a few didn't and won't and a few decided it wasn't important any more after a few weeks.

It's typical that a few cases like this can really bring the tone down but I think that's affecting me more than anything else.

In any event, in spite of this, today was a good day. In particular, I got a boost from my second class. I started my lesson on writing a program to decode a Caesar cipher. It wasn't exactly the same as the post. Today we started with a lot of internet history and culture - rot13, Usenet news, and the first public dialup Unix system on the internet the Big Electric Cat run by my old schoolmates and friends, Charles Foreman, Robert Sweeney, Lee Fischman, and Richard Newman.

We moved from there to starting to develop ideas behind finding a similarity score between two things based on the distance formula. I now that sounds like a weird topic jump but it made sense in context.

More to come in the next few classes.

After class in the halls I heard mutterings from students on how they thought it was a really cool lesson. Made me feel pretty good.

My earlier class wasn't particularly cool but it also went well. Mostly students sharing work. First part had them in groups and sharing solutions from the past weeks lab with other group members. The second part was more interesting and more fun. I had them look at each others solutions without discussion and then had group members explain and otherwise talk through other group members solutions. So, for example, in a four person group, group member A might chose question 3 from group member B's repo and then teach that solution to the full group of four.

I think was a productive exercise and time well spent. It's important to get them to share solutions and to be able to understand other peoples code so this was a step in the right direction.

So, that's it today. Nothing really deep, just sharing a good day in the classroom.