There’s a lot to gain from teaching, including the feeling of pride when you see students succeed at a difficult task. Hearing them say “Wow, this was easier than I thought!” is particularly rewarding.

This semester, though, I’m having a blast at the personalities I have in my class. If you missed my last teaching-related entry, I’m teaching an HTML lab, where students learn to prototype basic webpages for the purposes of Online Information Design (coincidentally, the name of the class).

This is my fourth semester teaching the lab, and over the past 3 semesters, I got sick of people submitting webpages with such thrilling content as “This is a header!”, “This is some content!” and other such greats. So I’ve been making a big push for people to really make the content meaningful (hopefully this ups the value of lab work as a portfolio piece… we’ll see). But I’ve also been getting some really fun quotes as a result…

• “All work and no play make [my] palms hairy.” (Filler text on one student’s homepage).
• “Welcome to my love sack.” (The title on one student’s homepage).
• “The plot’s a little ‘ify’, but watch this with your mate - guaranteed you’ll get some!” (A movie review on one student’s movie page).
• “Ben Affleck converts a lesbian to straightness and then loses her.” Possibly the best plot summary I’ve ever heard for the movie Chasing Amy. Followed up with a low rating “for having Affleck, even though it was made before he blew up.” I don’t even know what that means.

Well, at least they’re having fun…