One thing that amazes me in my classes over the last six years is that new students are dropped into my classes continually over the course of the year. Somewhere in my learning and teaching experiences I picked up the notion that it was important to be there in the classroom at the beginning of the school year or semester because starting later was going to be a real challenge, given all the stuff you missed if you weren’t there in the beginning. Now maybe that was just my college level mindset where you can’t miss a single class session without it messing up your grade, but this business of just dropping students in mid-stream and expecting “success” is a bit mind boggling. 

Interestingly, as a little kid in the 1960s I had a pretty big gap in my elementary education when we moved from Northern California, where I remember celebrating Halloween with my third grade classmates and then not going back to school (in Southern California) until after the Christmas break. I have no idea what I missed or how the lost two months might have effected my academic development, but except for some poor reading habit in elementary school, I turned out okay… over time. But I always caution against comparing my own experiences as a student (from a very long time ago) with whatever is happening now. 

Case in point, I have a group of students who have been dropped into one of my most crowded advanced robotics class, mid-year in this yearlong course, and I’m pretty sure they have minimum to no robotics experiences prior. I’ll work with the team that they have given me (to strain a sports metaphor), but this is hardly a way to work toward student (or staff) success. But somehow we do survive and many are successful. But none of this is anywhere approaching an optimal approach to education. Onward and upward, and I’m hoping for the best with this last group of robotics troopers, midway through week one of 19 in my final stint at the helm of this adventure in robotics education.