Kenyan Journal #9: Devil in the Kitchen
Habari ya leo - How's your day going?,
My work here mostly involves teaching students the ins and outs of Microsoft Office, particularly PowerPoint and Access. It's a humbling experience for a Waterloo computer science grad. There's no multi-threaded operating system design, no big-omega algorithm analysis, no sparse matrix diagonalisation or even any object oriented programming; just a talking paper clip.
Although teaching has lots of interesting pedagogical challenges, and there is some mildly interesting computer science to be taught in Access (boolean algebra, variable typing and regular expressions for those interested in knowing), I really wanted to break out some of the "mad stylz" I learnt at Waterloo.
I suppose that I was subconsciously sending the "I want to teach programming" message. Every part of Access that related to programming got noted as such. In fact I dubbed the whole idea of designing databases as "closer to computer programming than computer use" because the designer wasn't the same person as the end-user. That's a pretty big stretch, but it was useful for teaching user-centered database design.
After enough hints, a couple students came to me after class and asked if I'd be willing to teach them programming. "Sure!!!" I said, "When do we start?" So at lunch that Friday I taught the first lesson.
We started on the easy stuff, basic HTML, and progressed through the curriculum. (Thanks to Ivor and Dan for curriculum design help). HTML is a good place to start because it teaches that, unlike Microsoft Office, programming is not a WYSIWYG(What You See Is What You Get) activity. It also teaches that computers are very picky about syntax. If you misplace teh punctuation nothing works, just like in real computer programming. So on we toiled through HTML, and then started on DOS.
There wasn't much excitement, largely because the students here don't have any chance to use the Internet, so HTML is useless and foreign to them, a consideration that hadn't occurred to me when I wrote the curriculum. DOS didn't seem any more promising. What's the point of learning an arcane and antiquated operating system when Windows is much easier to use and much prettier besides?
So I re-ordered the curriculum and hurried straight to the programming part of DOS. This past Saturday we did our second DOS class, covering input and output redirection, piping and batch files. For the reader who hasn't spent several years playing with computers, those are the parts of DOS where you make the computer do what you want much faster and better than in Windows.
My ace-in-the-hole was that I had a practical application. During the break, I set some music playing on my computer. When the students returned I showed them how I could play music files in Windows, but the player only let me choose one file at a time. So to play several songs, I had to play the first one, wait until it finished, then choose the next one and so on. This meanst interrupting my work every few minutes to choose a new song.
Then I showed the students a way to play many songs in a row using a single music list file, and challenged them to make a DOS program to produce music list files.
There was a lot of enthusiasm, and I left the music playing as an added motivation. As I was helping one of the students with a question, I heard a thumping sound behind me and turned to see Julius dancing up a storm African-style to the Celtic licks of Ashley MacIsaac's Devil in the Kitchen. Some of his classmates were giggling, but most were clapping along.
When Julius saw me watching he stopped, "How do you dance to this music?" he asked.
"Well, Irish music like this is usually danced in groups of partners, but you can dance individually as well" I said. "The basic step is like this." I hoped from one foot to the other with a little kick every third step.
It's called the basic step with good reason, and Julius didn't look particularly impressed. I tried a couple cross-steps(1) with a stomping kick. Cross-steps are really easy, but at Celtic speed they create an illusion of difficulty. The illusion worked and there was a round of applause from the audience, much to my delight.
"Can you teach us Irish dancing?" Martin, another student, asked.
"Well, I don't know enough for more than a half hour lesson, but I'd be happy to show you that much, as long as you return the favour." I replied.
So next week we do our first Celtic/African dance lesson. Not the kind of "mad stylz" I was expecting, but lots of fun nonetheless.
Endelea kucheza ngoma - Dance on,
Yaacov
(1) I don't know if they're really called cross-steps. For those who are familiar with Jewish dancing, they're Horah steps. For those who aren't, it's a sideways step where you cross your feet over on another, alternating in front and behind.
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