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.