Many teachers are reluctant to try new things. Sometimes it's a bad case of "I'vealwaysdoneitthisway-itis." Sometimes it's not being comfortable with the new way or not having the time to develop whatever happens to be needed for the lesson and sometimes it's even coming from a good place.

What's that good place? Concern - if I try this new way and it doesn't work I'm going to lose some students and never get them back. My population is too at risk.

Ok, I buy that but I don't agree with it.

There will be a normal ebb and flow to your lessons anyway. Some days will be great, some not so much. Some lessons will be amazing, some will put the kids to sleep. Besides, you can almost always recover from a bad experience the following week.

Last week was Quicksort time. I've approached the problem in a variety of ways over the years. I straight out presented the algorithm, approached it from a functional point of view, put a specific element in place, approached it from a select the nth smallest item point of view and probably a few others.

This time, I thought I'd try code tracing. The motivation was that the in place partition algorithm can be a little hairy. The idea is actually pretty simple but first year CS2 students can find it difficult. This time, I presented them with the code and some trial runs for them to trace through. From there we developed the algorithm

I won't know if this approach was effective or not until next week but my gut was telling me that it was a bit bumpy. I don't think I was effectively able to connect from the code they worked through up to the algorithm. Some of the other approaches I've tried over the years left me equally unimpressed with myself but at the end of the day they weren't disasters so I'm guessing the class will ultimately prove to have been alright. Right now, I think the approach I used a couple of years ago of motivating quicksort by putting a specific element in place works best for me and my classes.

The moral of the story? I tried something. I don't think it worked particularly well. That's okay. I'll probably rework it and try it again in the future but as for today I know my kids will be fine. Maybe I botched the quicksort a bit but I'll fix that over the next few classes.

The real lesson of the day - Don't be afraid to try something new. We want our students to be unafraid of failure. We should be as well. It's rare the stakes are so high that we can't stumble an bumble a bit of a lesson and not recover.

When I was just starting out one of my mentors gave me some great advice: "You can always fix it tomorrow."