Tala

Animals, Kenya, Miscellaneous

We have lots of big animals in Africa, like lions, giraffes, hippos, etc. Well I have discovered a new tourist attraction in my very home: a man-eating spider was waiting above my front door when I came home tonight. As you may recall, this isn’t the first time I’ve had such an encounter… As I type the spider is staring at me, licking its lips, and I’m staring at the broom I’m going to use to whack the hell out of it.

I don’t usually kill them, but I just can’t take any chances with this one. I’m already freaked out when I enter a room and turn the light on, open a closet, put on a sweatshirt, slip into bed, or mess with the curtains. If it’s not a spider it’s a lizard, and if it’s not a lizard it’s a wasp; one time I even had a bat flying around inside the house when I got home at night. Oh, and don’t forget the dogs that run after me when I’m riding home after dark!

I can’t remember where they said the “Final Frontier” was, but Africa’s pretty frontiery… if you know what I mean. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go shake all my clothes, move everything away from the walls, and change my bed sheets. Africa is not for the faint of heart!

Kenya, Teaching

I have been teaching two classes to students this semester: Introduction to Programming and Algorithms and Network Essentials. So I’ve spent the past eight or nine weeks lecturing, giving assignments, and issuing CATs. I just gave the third CAT to my programming students and I thought it was pretty fair, but I was surprised at the results. Every student got this question completely wrong:

int main()
{
int salary = 15000;

if( salary > 15000 )
{
cout << "You have a nice job!" << endl; } else { cout << "You need a new job!" << endl; } }

Asked what this small program would print when executed, they all answered “3.” I wrote this question to test understanding of two concepts: the conditional if/else structure and the “>” operator. I figured that even if the students didn’t understand the programming syntax, logic alone would guide them. After all, “greater-than” is a concept in plenty of other disciplines besides computer science.

It’s not like I haven’t been teaching them! We have definitely talked about both of these concepts in class, and I even had them try similar examples in the computer lab over the course of the semester.

Maybe it’s not supposed to make sense, like the people who built a machine to calculate the purpose of life, the universe, and everything in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy; the machine spent millions of years calculating, only to spit out “42.” Maybe “3” is the right answer and I’m just not asking the right question, haha.