Gretchen's first byline

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In September 2010, Gretchen was babysitting for the editor of the neighborhood newsletter.  So she wrote...

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Teaching Day 2 - post arctic blast

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A teacher's institute day and a cold weather day with no classes and three weeks have passed.  It's probably a bit too much to expect kids to remember anything. So we started again. Boys are still squirrels and girls are quiet rule followers.  This is an after school activity; kids are a little wound up.  They still have to take turns, mind their business and be good classroom citizens.  Clearly, that's difficult.  Our class is 2nd graders to 6th graders.  We split into two groups.  I've got the little ones - 2nd and 3rd graders. They have trouble clicking in small spaces and finding letters on the keyboard. Today, the curriculum tried to introduce a looping construct (repeat a set of instructions over and over) and more debugging (here's a program; there's something wrong with it - fix it).  Tall order.  I can see some deficiencies with the program for little hands.  If they move some of the blocks too far out of the way, it behave...
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Surprises on my final day

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It's surprising to me that in only a couple hours, I've been able to learn so much about people that I've been interacting over the phone for the last three months. The view I had been able to build was so incomplete. A meal here, a short conversation there - suddenly these relationships go from being superficial and one-dimensional to much richer. People that I've been speaking with have families and lives outside of work (not really an earth shattering revelation, but I surprised at how much it matters). It is also surprising (to me) that my capacity and willingness to try new things has limits. At home, I am always pushing for, "Let's go out and eat Chinese, or Korean or Indian." I thought I was game for anything new any time (or all the time). I've found that after only a week, I'm actually hungering for something more familiar more what I'm used to. Aside - I'm actually thinking back to my lunch. I had a dish (Indian obviousl...
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Teaching day 1

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My kids are off at University and all my high school booster responsibilities are done.  I've downsized and I have some extra free time.  For years I've said that I would like to teach and a little opportunity to do just that came up.  I grabbed it. I've found a company run by a tech guy in his spare time that offers various after school STEM programs.  He's got loads of things he offers to schools / PTAs.  This group selected  an after school enrichment class in software coding.  The curriculum is self paced and drag & drop.  The essentially make programs out of virtual Lego blocks.  Today was the first day of class.  We're got kids from 1st grade to 6th grade.  There's 13 of them.   Some observations.  Second graders are different than 5th graders.  The little kids' fine motor skills are not as developed as the big kids.  Mouse pad movements was often done with their ...
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