Teaching Philosophy

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Welcome to my course wiki and academic website. Hopefully any information you may need can be found here. And if you think something should be included that isn't, let me know!

Teaching Philosophy

John Cage’s 10 Rules for Students and Teachers

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.

RULE TWO: General duties of a student - pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher - pull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined - this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There's no win and no fail, there's only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It's the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Don't try to create and analyze at the same time. They're different processes.

RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: "We're breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities."

(John Cage)

HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at all things carefully, often. Save everything - it might come in handy later.

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Attendance Policy

Be in class, that is all.

Much of what we do will be based on individual / group work or conversational in nature. Missing class means you will miss information which will in turn affect your performance in class. You are obviously capable of making your own decisions, make bad ones and unfavorable consequences are sure to follow.

That said, if you’re sick, don’t bring it to us. You should let me know on the day of class and make arrangements to complete any missed work. I also make allowances for family issues / emergencies where your presence is needed.

If you are a student athlete or some integral part of a sports event, your absence will also be considered accordingly.

Please do not:

1) Sleep in class

2) Do homework in class

3) Be disrespectful!

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Grading Policy

Your best work will always come from intelligent ideas presented in an engaging manner. Your production work will be evaluated based on these criteria:

Note: this table is only applied to the two courses (Algorithms and Complexity I and Programming Fundamentals)

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