February the 18th: Advanced LaTeX Workshop
If you're interested in the Advanced LaTeX Workshop that this day illustrates, the worksheet is available, and so are the bits of referenced code.
By and large it went well. If all teaching was like teaching Sam, illustrated in this first picture with Andrew, the CompSoc President, I'd want to do it all the time. It wasn't really teaching ... Sam had a particular problem with transparency for a poster he was producing. Now, offhand, I have no idea how to deal with transparency; it's not something I've done. But I know that if something's not in the basic LaTeX install (and transparency as Sam wanted it clearly wasn't), one should trot off to CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network, to search for packages that might help.
In this case, doing that, and showing Sam how, took about 5 minutes. It was clear from the documentation we found that the package transparent would do what Sam wanted, although implementing it wasn't going to be completely straightforward. But he knew enough to start experimenting with it, occasionally asking me for advice on what to try next when he was stuck, and essentially I was able to pop back now and again in between dealing with other questions to see how he was getting on. By the end of the session he'd got his poster from merely looking good to looking fantastic, and I'd got a whole new technique I knew nothing about. Teaching, if you can call it that, at its finest.
Another sample of how good a workshop like this can be: two people whose names I have completely forgotten (probably either Sam or Simon; almost everyone there was called one or the other) discuss something they've found or I've already explained for one of them, from one of the books I'd brought. This is how to learn LaTeX: trial, error, and discussion.
Behind the two Sam-or-Simons we have Ian. He is worthy of note because of a conversation we once had:
Jenny:
Ian: You shouldn't put so much salt on your chips! You'll die of a coronary before you're 25!!
Jenny: That'll be tricky!
Ian: What?
Jenny: I'm 29.
Ian: You're not. You aren't! Are you really?
I'm fairly sure he was genuinely bewildered. It was great. My hero.
By and large it went well. If all teaching was like teaching Sam, illustrated in this first picture with Andrew, the CompSoc President, I'd want to do it all the time. It wasn't really teaching ... Sam had a particular problem with transparency for a poster he was producing. Now, offhand, I have no idea how to deal with transparency; it's not something I've done. But I know that if something's not in the basic LaTeX install (and transparency as Sam wanted it clearly wasn't), one should trot off to CTAN, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network, to search for packages that might help.
In this case, doing that, and showing Sam how, took about 5 minutes. It was clear from the documentation we found that the package transparent would do what Sam wanted, although implementing it wasn't going to be completely straightforward. But he knew enough to start experimenting with it, occasionally asking me for advice on what to try next when he was stuck, and essentially I was able to pop back now and again in between dealing with other questions to see how he was getting on. By the end of the session he'd got his poster from merely looking good to looking fantastic, and I'd got a whole new technique I knew nothing about. Teaching, if you can call it that, at its finest.
Another sample of how good a workshop like this can be: two people whose names I have completely forgotten (probably either Sam or Simon; almost everyone there was called one or the other) discuss something they've found or I've already explained for one of them, from one of the books I'd brought. This is how to learn LaTeX: trial, error, and discussion.
Behind the two Sam-or-Simons we have Ian. He is worthy of note because of a conversation we once had:
Jenny:
Ian: You shouldn't put so much salt on your chips! You'll die of a coronary before you're 25!!
Jenny: That'll be tricky!
Ian: What?
Jenny: I'm 29.
Ian: You're not. You aren't! Are you really?
I'm fairly sure he was genuinely bewildered. It was great. My hero.