New Class.

This week, I taught a new class for the Arlington Public Schools. I now teach night school for adult education.

The official title was "Advanced Functions in Excel"

It was awesome. The computers were antiquated, but they had most of what I needed.

The participants were great. One is learning new skills while between jobs, one teaches basic Excel, and one was a CPA.

They each got different things. The woman between jobs learned about vlookup, the Excel instructor now knows "if", and the CPA can do index/match.

Next time: Pivot Tables.

Pretending.

"Humans have more important things to do than pretend to be machines." -- The Unincorporated Man

I am so stealing that quote.

google.cn

When google.cn came out, I was in grad school. I did some basic searches to look for filtering and blocking. The most obvious was "tiananmen square"

Back then, the search gave pretty pictures, flowers, and everything was modern day. The google.com result gave something altogether different: destruction, and a man stopping a tank by will alone.

I just did the same search.

Google.com Image Search Result

Google China Tiananmen Square search

Google.cn search for Tienanmen Square.

In the first google.cn search, I used google's preferred spelling. In the second, bloggers.

The first shows a few images from the massacre. The second predominately shows the massacre.

large samples.

With access to large data sets, we can run standard statistical tests with much large sample sizes than ever before.

When this happens, it becomes really easy to have a very low p-value. Forget 0.05, we're talking 0.00001.

A more interesting question becomes: Is the difference large enough to be interesting?

The Job Hunt.

Something obvious occurred to me. The point of any job hunt is to find a new local maximum.

Here's the claim: With each job and payrate, there's a certain set-point of happiness that the job returns to. Get a pay raise, and that set point goes up -- but less than we'd like to think.

But, get a job doing something you find more important, or just more rewarding, and the set point goes up a lot.

And here's when you should change jobs: When the set point for your current job is considerably lower than where you want to be.

I've got a chart for that. This chart shows the original happiness at a job, and what happens when reality hits. A pay raise goes along with increase in happiness, as does additional responsibilities.

Here's the problem: At least in this example, the happiness increases in the position have failed to keep up with the desired satisfaction.

There are two ways out of this: change a job or lower expectations.

Which do you think should happen?

Teaching Night School.

It is official: If I finish the paperwork, I'll be teaching night classes in October!

While they are going to pay me for this, I consider this to be largely volunteer work. It is for the Arlington Public Schools Adult Education, and it is largely open to anyone who can pay. That price is:
$109 Arlington Residents
$85 Arlington Seniors
$145 non-Arlington Resident
$109 Non-Resident Senior

The course is entitled Excel: Beyond The Basics. According to the course description I've been handed, it will cover:

--Named Ranges.
--Conditional formatting
--Logic Functions to test data
--Comments
--External Data

This needs to happen in 3 3-hour session.

I am almost certainly going to wind up tailoring from the podium. With a 10 minute break each session, 10 minutes to warm up and cool off each time, and a half hour of introductions in the first session, I've got 7 hours. That's about 84 minutes per topic.

Here's the plan:

---- Named Ranges ----
If I'm doing named Ranges in 80 minutes, I will probably cover 2 ways to create them, explain the Named Ranged Edit Box, and show them used in a few formulas. Then give a 20 minute exercise where they create a named range and use it in a formula. We'll then do a second formula. Then we update the named range, and show how it cascades through each formula.


---- Conditional Formatting ---
As for conditional formatting, I'll start with "wouldn't it be nice if negative numbers could easily came up in red?" -- and yes, i know this is doable through other means. But, if we allow the zero to be arbitrary, it becomes much more useful.

For instance, when measuring out my monthly spending, I want Excel to tell me in RED if my checking balance will ever be below a thousand bucks.

---- Logical Functions To Test Data ---
Here's the real trick: We just did this in "Conditional Formatting". This'll be a lot of 'if my outgoing money is bigger than my income revenue, what happens?'

I'm liable to find or create a decent data set and do some fun work with "and" and "0r". I'll avoid NAND.

---- Comments ---
the most useful thing comments can do for is is the same thing they do in code: Tell a future version of yourself or other programming what the hell you were talking about. I'll discuss this. Then I'll pull up a spreadsheet without any comments and ask them what it means. Then I'll pull up a decently commented version, and it'll be a lot easier to figure out.

---- External Data ---
We may do a web query, at least if there is active internet access. Otherwise, I'll bring in a comma-delimited file and we can figure it out.

---- Pivot Tables ---
If we have any time left, I'm liable to go back to the well and discuss pivot tables. We'll talk about the utility of pivotting data, and why it matters. I'll use a data set -- possibly a credit card statement -- with a few hundred rows. Then, we pivot the data and some things become almost immediately obvious.

Speed of thought visual data analysis. Awesome.

So, that's my plan to teach Excel to a population that shows up and wants to improve themselves.

This is a plan in progress, and I expect it to be modified as time goes on. I also expect I will wind up doing some tailing from the podium to bring the course into line with the expectations of the students. I hope they feel comfortable telling me if they have stopped following, or if I am going to slow. To ensure that, I'll need to establish trust in the beginning.

My guess is credibility will be easy to establish with this crowd, but trust a lot harder than with the government analysts I've been training.

I think I'll do that by:
1) Not stressing the fancy degrees, but mentioning.
2) Making intentional mistakes.
3) Asking everyone what their expectations are, and constant checkins on how they feel.
4) Dressing less fancy than when I deliver for the company. I'm thinking sandals plus business casual.

If I manage all that, I should be able to establish credibility, maintain trust and ensure attention.

Responsibilities.

I work for a training firm. What we do is assist employees, usually federal ones, in developing skills, both for the job and --- often -- skills that are useful in other ways.

Over the last year my responsibilities have grown tremendously.

In May, I taught my first course, a 3-day with 5 participants. In June, I taught a 5-day course with neither backup nor a safety net. There were 18 people in the course. In July, I created the majority of a new course. It was a major rewrite of some curriculum, and I won most of the fights I was really interested in. Two weeks ago, my boss put me on call while he was teaching a class in case he needed to attend to family matters.

In August, I'm teaching 2 courses. There is one work day between the two. This will be a total of four classes taught this summer.

Last summer, working for the same company, I wrote some exercises and took a course from another division of our company.

This is a fairly sizable difference in responsibilities. I've become a trusted member of the workforce, and am directly interacting with our clients and representing the company.

If that's what a year has done, I wonder what another year will do?