… almost lost points on that last CSC 140 lab. He’d given us this wonderful metaphor of not giving too much information when setting up a class because it would be “like having an egg in the recipe card” (or cement in your blueprint)… so I didn’t give my object reference variables actual values, but I did give too much.
It’s just a lot easier to come down and talk about square roots and cube roots and simplifying denominators and breaking the steps down into meaningful, visual bytes bites… and reminding the “big picture” folks that some of these problems don’t lend themselves to the “quick look and you can have a good idea of what the end will be like” — that sometimes you have to get from one crack in the rock to the other… and that sometimes you have to practice parts of a piece at a time, and then see how they work together to get you the big picture.
Got some good “big picture” ideas on the ride in, but wondered at how they felt just a tad like the “brilliant” ideas one sometimes gets drifting off to sleep. This made me wonder about the way I need less sleep if I’m getting more exercise, and how that relates to the recent research on sleep and how it basically “cleans” stuff up (fabricating dreams along the way). I’m thinking that a lot of the “not really thinking” that happens on a ride might be serviing the same function — and maybe I’ll experiment with that (on the prairie, though, not in town ;)).
Resource Room Dot Net Blog 
Posted on November 5, 2013
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