Reflection¶
- Author: Richel
- Date: 2025-10-10
- Day: Advanced
Preparation¶
Time was tight, also due to illness, yet I felt fine about the final result, due to some ruthless prioritizations.
Start¶
At 9:00, there were zero learners. With the four teachers there, we decided what to do: start teaching at 10:00 again, as some assumed that our learners may think that the course starts at 10:00 (as all other days have a login session at 9:00). I left the Zoom room, to work on other things. At around 9:17 I saw a Matrix message about a learner having arrived. I came back and started teaching to 1 learner.
It was very interactive, also thanks to the learner himself, that was not shy to ask questions: he really seemed to know how to get the most out of a course.
I introduced the schedule for the day.
We did all the exercises in my first session, including reading in silence. It was really silent then. As this session was interactive (when not reading), it was nice to see the misconceptions that popped up and could be fixed: the learner thought that the time units could not be split up. I’ve updated the course material to reflect that.
We did a subset of the exercises of ‘Thread parallelism’:
| Exercise | Done |
|---|---|
| 1 | Yes |
| 2 | Yes |
| 3 | Yes |
| 4 | Yes |
| 5 | No: nobody to share with |
| 6 | No: no time |
| 7 | Yes |
| X1 | No: exercise X2 was more interesting |
| X2 | Yes |
The main reason for not doing everything was due to (1) having 20 minutes less, (2) me preferring an in-depth discussion over doing more. Would it start at the scheduled starting time, I think it would have worked.
During my first two hours, there were some colleagues in the background. One of them used the chat to explain why the speed measurements on Kebnekaise are so noisy: Kebnekaise is very heterogeneous https://www.hpc2n.umu.se/resources/hardware/kebnekaise ! I’ve already added this to the course material during reading.
All in all, I’ve had a good time with our learner and I think we spent it well.