[F00Fbug]

Great article! I taught full-time for a while and progressed to program coordinator and eventually department chair. I hated the bureaucracy and ended up leaving. I hang on as an adjunct and still teach one or two sections a semester. My favorite is an intro to programming class using Python - I love to see the lightbulb come on when it all falls into place. That's usually a couple of students out of 25.

I don't get why students don't come to office hours - hardly anyone ever does. I see it as a critical part of my job as service to the students. Some of them are just flailing, yet they don't reach out.

I miss teaching in person. Since Covid, all my classes have been online. I would follow the lecture material, but would also demonstrate important aspects of each topic as we went through them and encouraged the students to do the same on their laptops.

My biggest challenge are these online learning platforms. We use ZyBooks. There are two components, the "book" part where the student reads and the programming part where they write some code. The second part sucks. It's not real programming; it's a padded cell where the student writes code and provides any input. The output is automatically evaluated pass/fail. The student has no interaction with the operating system or interpreter and in my opinion, it loses something without that context. They could have an extra CR/LF in the output and they'd fail the assignment. In the real world, who cares? The problems are often absurd; asking for things that nobody would ever encounter.

My final rant is student-focused. I get a lot of emails like, "I'm trying this and here's a screenshot of my code and I get this error message and I can't figure it out." Somedays I want so badly to tell them that if they pasted the contents of their email into google instead of sending it as an email, the solution would be one of the first three results!!!

[aleph_minus_one]

> I don't get why students don't come to office hours - hardly anyone ever does.

Honest answer from my student time: because as a student you are/were learning and solving exercise sheets nearly all the time. Thus you typically didn't have time to come to the office hours.

Before you are able to ask questions about lecture topics, you better first understand where your understanding problem is and which questions you actually have to ask. This requires quite some time that you typically don't have - because of learning of solving exercise sheets.