My Experience With Teaching

Day 5:
This was to be my first day with actual hands-on Linux practice. The lab/classroom I was using didn't have any connectivity to the LAN, so I asked the dean if I could use another lab. He said "ok, if there isn't another class using it". Luckly, there wasn't. So we settled in this lab. One of the PCs had a connection to an overhead projector that used the wall as a screen. I thought i was going to use it, but it turned out I didn't. First, I needed every PC hooked
up with PuTTY, a telnet/SSH client for Windows (because all the PCs in the lab had Windows 2K installed). A couple of my students had their laptops hooked up with linux, so no problem there. All I needed for the class was a working bash shell on linux. First, I tried downloading it to a floppy disk and try to distribute it on that. I didn't have a floppy, so I asked one of my students for one. It didn't work. While I was at it, another student offered an USB thumbdrive (a 64MB one, I think). That could work, I thought, and he and another student tried that option, while I decided to copy the URL of the PUTTY Download Page to an open shell I had open on the PC with the projector hooked up. That didn't work because of the font, the lighting of the room and the zoom thing. So, I decided to give them a longer method instead. "Log on to google.com, and search for 'putty'. Click on the 2nd link. Download the putty.exe file." That, surprisingly, worked better than I thought, because in a few mins, everyone had their copy of PuTTY working. The guys with the thumbdrive did a good job too, although they only copied the program to a couple of computers. BTW, there was this girl that wanted to enter my class "just as a listener". Turned out she wanted to surf the web on an empty PC I had. Now that I think about it, I should've kicked that girl's sorry ass out of my class, because one of my students turned out late and had to use the PC with the projector. Like I said, I wasn't really using it, but still... Back to the class... After everyone had their putty program opened, I continued to guide them thru the process of connecting to the server we were going to use. After they had everything set up, I had to give away their usernames and passwords to everyone. I had the brilliant idea the day before to do that on paper. But I used the default font and default size and the individual pieces of paper with usernames and passwords that came out were tiny! I put them on an envelope and took them to class. I started calling out their student ID numbers, and they stepped forward and grabbed the little piece of paper. Turns out only 2 of my students missed that class, which is good. Ok. Now I asked them to log on the server. From there everything went smoothly, I think. We only covered a couple of commands, directory navigation, environment variables, file creation with cat, file permissions, chmod, chown and chgrp. I'm basing my course heavily on the manual my friends Jorge and Paco churned out a couple of years ago. Pretty useful stuff. This was back when we were on the ITESM LUG. I gave them some homework too. Actually, this particular piece of homework is on the style of "ask something you don't actually know" kind of thing. Although I think I asked them so... convincingly that they didn't notice that I had no idea about that particular question. Hopefully, they'll get it right. I'm really looking forward to next class.