Reading the other posts I did here, I remembered about what happened after the exam. I did give them another exam. That'd be the 2nd one. It was a practical exam. We had a practice session on a Sunday (yes, I know... But it was the only available day), and it went well. Then, I modified that same practice session and added a few things and produced the exam. I told them that they had a full day to do it. They needed to write down the command or sequence of commands to produce the effect or information I asked them for, PLUS a typescript file of all their work. I really thought I could read back these files, 'cause I've used it before (as a student) in one of my classes. What I didn't know was that there isn't any typescript viewer for LINUX!! It's just... Weird... So, I had to analyze the files by hand, that were full of backspace and new-line codes, among other things, trying to make sense of them. I have to admit I had better results than in the first exam. Seems the practical session proved to be useful after all.
After that, I tried to get them to do a little presentation about network services on Linux. Oh God... What a disappointing experience. I guess I expected too much from them, and I guess I wasn't exactly a great teacher either. And then after that came the whole LAN project.
I completely forgot to blog the rest of my classes in here, but it went pretty much the same. As a final project (I didn't ask them for a 3rd partial exam or a final exam), I wanted them to build a small office LAN environment, with Linux-based services: email, web, ftp, DHCP, DNS, file & printer sharing and internet gateway/firewall. I told them to get in groups of 2 and I gave each team a couple of services to implement. This would be from installing the machine, to configuring the service, to doing a test drive of the service. I must admit this was an exercise that was a good idea, but was poorly executed. Mainly because I didn't see the degree of difficulty some of the services would have, for example the firewall bit. I didn't give them any tools to manage the hard work of configuring IPChains/IPTables. And I think they didn't grasp the main technical concepts that well. Others did very well with easy services like DHCP and Web. Others just couldn't manage to get it off the ground but at least tried, and others didn't even try. So, the final outcome of all this was that 5 people failed the class. These people didn't do homework or work at all. So I couldn't help them. I was aware that I passed a couple of slackers, but they managed to stay on level with the rest of the class at some point. I was slightly disappointed by the results, but it was quite good to be my first experience with teaching a college level class. I loved it. And now I have the opportunity to do it all over again. A week ago I got a call from the dean telling me that they wanted me back to teach the same class. I was all giddy. The only difference is that now I have to teach on Saturdays from 8 to 10. Ugh. Too damn early if you ask me. But it's good. Love to be back teaching. I have a smaller class (10 people), and somehow they seem a bit brighter. Maybe it's just that I have high expectations of this new class. Let's see if I think the same after a month.