tysolna | Mar. 8th, 2005

Barely a day after I came back from London, I had to teach a beginner's class on HTML. I was still rather tired - it would be too much to say that I was jetlagged, but after three days of running around in the wet and cold, I felt under the weather. It took me a little while to wake up properly, but that didn't matter much - If there is one class I can hold in my sleep, it's beginning HTML.

The interesting thing was that for the first time in a long while, I was teaching a mixed-gender group. The class was advertised as being for women only, same as usual, but that information was not in the online ads, so I had three men sitting next to four women. OK, so one of the men was a fourteen year old boy; he also was the fastest learner of the three male students, though also the quietest.
There is really no difference between teaching a women-only and a mixed-gender class, at least to me; I teach people. I was most exasperated with one of the men; he didn't seem to want to listen to me, and I had to tell him everything twice. One of the women was revealed to actually be a computer student, knowing Java, Pascal, C and C++. HTML posed few problems to her.

All the people in the class were excellent. I have never before taught this topic and got as far as framesets. Tables, yes, but only in the last hour or so. But framesets? I was amazed at the speed they were assimilating HTML. And yes, I do teach them to hand-code HTML, from the bare-bones basic HTML page upwards. I wish I had classes like this more often.