Telling the Dragon Story, Three Times.

After the fairly large-sized fiasco that was Mr. Denise's class on Tuesday, he directed us to go "back to basics" in each of our computer classes.

I did that today.

I started each class today with an allegorical story. The story was about an Old General who had trained a fine army for a far away kingdom. He trained the army for 10 years and then retired to a farm to write history books. The next fall, the king was told of an approaching Dragon that threatened the kingdom. Not fully trusting his new general, he went to the Old General and asked for his help.

The Old General agreed, and came back to the castle to train with the kingdom's finest knights. He trained with them for two full weeks, showing them advanced thrust and parry techniques, as well as a neat "sword-throw," that allowed a knight to throw his sword with deadly accuracy from 30 yards away.

The king's scouts came and reported that the Dragon was coming across the countryside, burning farms as he came. The Dragon would likely reach the castle on Tuesday morning.

The Old General spent all day on Monday preparing the knights, planning his attacks and his flanking maneuvers. At the end of the day, he was satisfied that the knights were well prepared to meet the Dragon on the field of battle.

As Monday morning dawned, the Old General went to the courtyard and had his herald blow the trumpet to call the knights. The Old General waited. And Waited.

Back in the barracks, one knight thought that he might have left his sword in the dining hall when he used it as a toothpick the night before. Another knight swore that he had left his sword in his sock drawer, but now could not find it. Two or three knights couldn't even make it out of bed. One knight was pretty sure that he had left his suit of armor on the Armorers Wagon the other day and that it might now be in the next kingdom over.

As the Dragon came over the hill, the knights finally assembled on the battlefield. Most had no swords. Three were in their underwear. Nobody had a shield.

As the Old General watched from the tower, the Dragon advanced, spewing flames and crisping knights left and right. A lucky few managed to run for the woods.

The Old General called for the two new Generals to meet him in the war room. He sat them down, looked them in the eye, and...

"..what do you think Mr. Denise said to Mr. Jewett and Mr. Burkhard about his project in our 3rd Period class?"

Of course, the story is an allegory for his teaching of his lesson in our advanced Web Design Class. The kids did well in getting down some of the advanced techniques down, but when it came time to do the simple things,such as uploading their files to the webserver, things went straight to hell.

He admonished us for not spending enough time covering the basics of file management and that we needed to go over this with each class again.

That is what we did today. We started at the beginning and went over the Desktop, the Server, the Web server, file names, project folders, uploading, everything.

The kids all had to completely reorganize their web folders, using project folders and proper file names. They had to complete this before moving on to any other projects. The assignment was worth 100 points. Almost every kid eventually got it done.

I get to do the exact same lecture 3 more times on Thursday, once with Ali, my CSU Project Promise teacher observing.

Should be fun!