My Experience With Teaching

It's kind of sad that I didn't get to finish this blog properly, but with work and the class, there was practically no time to blog. I know this is like my trademark: update-every-3-months blog. But I'm trying to stay current... I really am.
Well, what happened after the exam can be summarized like this. I felt like crap after grading that exam, because only 4 people passed it. So, I gave them a chance to upgrade their score by doing a paper on Real Time Linux. 20 points if they did a good job. The papers were pure CRAP. It was copy+paste hell. IDENTICAL copies of webpages, down to the fonts they used and the grammatical and spelling errors they had. I said "do it again, and this time DO NOT copy+paste webpages. Try to use your brain for once." (I didn't say that exactly, but that was the main idea). 80% re-did the paper. Same results. I gave up. These people were too used to doing copy+paste.
So, the next thing I did was "let's do the practical stuff". I spent the next month teaching them in the lab individual commands, their syntax and use. They practiced that on the computer at the same time. This seemed to work better than the other classes. At the end of these classes I gave them a practice-only homework. 20 questions, all answers were commands or combinations of commands that they had to figure out. Nothing I didn't teach them or anything, but there's more than one way to do things on Linux. I got a really positive response from this homework. Even the ones that were really behind started improving right away, asking questions and actually working. I was really impressed.
The exam for that unit was a lot like that homework, but with fewer and harder questions. The result: I think only 4 people failed. I was definitely pleased.