So, good morning and welcome to the second day of the workshop. I am glad to introduce two of my colleagues who work extensively in education technology as I mentioned yesterday. My right is Professor Sridhar Iyer, so welcome Sridhar and Professor Sana Murti, welcome Sana. Thank you so much first of all for agreeing to this. I'll just take two minutes of your time to tell you very briefly about their accomplishments. Professor Sridhar Iyer actually is an IIT Bombay product from his B-Tech to M-Tech. Sometime in between he went to US, came back and pursued his PhD. He was a teacher at IIT Guwahati and when he decided to move back to Mumbai for family reasons I was able to convince him to continue the academic profession, that's how he came with us. He came with IIT Bombay for more than a decade and a half, he's actually an accomplished researcher in networking but somewhere down the line he got deeply interested into the educational processes and when the intensive program in education technology started, since its inception he has been contributing to it very significantly. While you will know about his accomplishments in educational technology research I would like to mention just one small thing which to me is important to show his passion for education. He got interested in how to educate young children well in schools on use of computers. So he initiated a magazine called Computer Musty, he became a book and there are a series of books now available for different standards. In fact he has set up a separate company to handle that but that contribution in my mind is equally important of course to us what is important is work in education technology so he will be talking to you about actual learning and he will also take the last session in the flip classroom. Professor Sahana Murthy she has actually worked in physics education research in MIT before she decided to come back to India and currently she happens to be the only full time faculty member for our interdisciplinary program in education technology. In fact when she came back at that time I was just trying things out with the early design of the clicker and it was she who helped us to understand the device better and its usage in fact much better so I am thankful to her for participating in those activities right from the beginning and she has been a wonderful part of our team particularly giving strong inputs on to the appropriate pedagogy for use when we extensively use technology in our teaching learning processes. So over to this duo for the day. The idea behind today's session is not so much of what we learn as computer programming but a lot to do with how we want to teach computer programming so this is lot of it is from what will we do in the classroom perspective. So one of the things that we want to understand here is this concept called active learning so the key idea here is that often as teachers we are focusing more and more on ourselves right we say that how do I do how do I improve my lecture how do I explain something better how do I ensure that students are able to follow something so a lot of our effort goes towards improving our own delivery of the lecture so the idea behind active learning is to say that ok while that is required while the teacher's delivery and diction and precision all of that is required what is important is how much are the students learning are the students actually learning so that is the basic idea of active learning. So let us consider a series of teaching learning scenarios right now ok so in the first scenario the teacher lectures on a topic for one hour ok and the students simply listen so there are some teachers who are very good at doing this they will grip the students for an hour the students will listen to them enthralled completely so that is one scenario. The next one is that the teacher lectures but now every 20 minutes she pauses and asks did you understand are you getting it is it making sense so now when the question is asked some students not and some students are going to give some feedback to the teacher and then now the teacher resumes the lecture so we can all identify ourselves as having done these things sometimes. The third scenario the teacher pauses every 20 minutes and not only ask did you understand the teacher also asks do you have any doubts ok so at this point some students may say that ok I have a doubt then the teacher may clarify that doubt and then the teacher may resume the lecture from that point so the teacher ask do you have any doubts students raise their hands and then teacher clarifies the doubt and resume the lecture so that is the third scenario ok so in the fourth scenario there is something slightly different that happens so every 20 minutes now the teacher ask students to clarify their notes with each other ok so she says that ok each student should turn to their neighbor and discuss their notes so for the past 20 minutes suppose I have been talking about the topic of arrays after 20 minutes I will say that ok now it is time for you to switch and look at what is the what is it that you have understood look at have you missed something of the notes and discussed between the students so that is the fourth scenario the fifth scenario what happens is the teacher lectures on a topic for 20 minutes and she then pauses a real life application problem based on that topic for example we may say that having lectured on the topic of arrays we may pose a problem saying that ok now given an array of integers device a mechanism to ensure that the array is in increasing order so that is an example of a real life application of whatever topic that is being considered ok so students now discuss in groups of 3 and 4 and device a solution to the problem the important thing here is that this cannot be done within a couple of minutes so the students spend about 20 minutes devising the solution to the problem so in this case in the case of arrays the solution would be of coming up with some sorting algorithms and the students invent or rediscover some stock sorting algorithms and then the teacher wraps up by conducting a discussion of challenging points and summarizing the solutions for sorting so that is one another scenario of how the teacher may teach a topic then there is one more scenario where the teacher starts the class with the two group debate on the pros and cons of two methods that was taught in the class ok so for example the teacher may have taught the topic of arrays as well as the topic of link lists ok so may have introduced the notion of implementing a stack using both an array as well as a link list and the teacher now starts the class with the two group debate on the pros and cons of the two methods that was taught in the class so one group would do the pros of arrays and the other group would do the pros of the link list when is it good to use an array versus when is it good to use a link list so students now here work in groups to come up with the pros and cons this again takes about 15 to 20 minutes and then teacher summarizes which is a better method for which situation so for example if we want to simply do insert and remove from the top of the list then it may be easier to use a link list on the other hand if we want to be able to randomly access the items if we want to be able to access items based on index or if we want to be able to do a binary search on the sequence of elements that we have then the array implementation may be better so the teacher will summarize things like that and then poses a more complex problem students then choose one of the methods and then solve that problem so the problem may be now saying that implement come up with the implementation of a stack using an array or come up with an implementation of a stack using a link list so the students actually work on it and come up with the functions of push and pop on the stack with these methods so to summarize there are all these scenarios that we are talking about so the first scenario the teacher simply lectures the second scenario the teacher lectures and periodically asks did you understand the third scenario the teacher lectures and periodically asks do you have any doubts from the fourth scenario onwards the students are talking to each other in some manner the teacher lectures and ask the students to clarify their notes with each other then she ask students to discuss device solution to the problem and in the last scenario the students are also debating so keeping all these scenarios in mind these are various types of teachers you may imagine that these are various types of teaching styles now let us ask the question so the question is so this activity that we are performing is called think pair share basically there are three phases there is a think phase there is a pair phase and there is a share phase so what we want to do is that in the teaching scenario some things are changing from one scenario to another so what you want to do in the think phase the think phase is something that you need to do individually each of you will have to do this right two quantities which are increasing so the idea here is that do not talk to anybody yet and simply think about it on your own so I will put back the scenarios right now look at the scenarios and write two quantities that are increasing as the as the scenarios are going increasing in the increasing order of the scenarios in some centers it appears that people are just sitting so what I would like you to do is to please write down the scenarios it is not possible to get this concept of active learning by simply sitting or by talking to each other so what you are required to do at this point is to write two quantities which are increasing across these scenarios think individually and write two quantities which are increasing so assuming that all of you would have at least come up with one quantity which is increasing so what you want to do is now in the pair phase which is the next phase turn to your neighbor and compare your answers and together come up with at least one change which is related to students what is changing in terms of the student behavior or the student actions and one change which is related to the teacher so this is the exercise that you have to do in a pair so turn to your neighbor compare what you have written what your neighbor has written and come up with at least one change related to students and one change that is related to the teacher can take about five minutes to do do this activity so in many centers I find that people are still waiting for me to say something so I am going to say something ok the something is that please turn to your neighbor and talk to your neighbor do not wait for me to say something ok so let us move on to the next phase now which is called the share phase so the coordinators who had come for the coordinators workshop will remember this session which I had taken on think pair share and now they will I think recall what we had done in that session so essentially now what is required is that participants should share your student related change and teacher related change with your fellow participants and the coordinator and the coordinator should share the most frequent answer from your center via the a view chat ok so some center as a question saying that what two quantities is not clear which quantity is not clear so the point we want to make is what is increasing as these scenarios increase what do you find is increasing I mean it might be the time that somebody spends or it might be the activity so it is really we are not talking about quantities of need not be of the same units we just have to identify what the quantities are and identify that what are the things that are changing with respect to a student as well as what are the things that are changing with respect to a teacher so let me put back the scenario slide while you are sending me your responses ok so there are a lot of responses that have come in many of them are good responses so let me just talk about a few so some of you are have said that student interaction is increasing faculty involvement is increasing then some centers are saying that there is less monotonous lecture there is active participation so a lot of people are saying that there is active participation it is more interaction with the students and thinking and writing by the students are two quantities which are increasing ok time and grasping time spent and the grasping are two quantities which are increasing continuous learning for the students learning by doing somebody is saying that it's learning by doing is happening a teaching time is increasing even weak students gets involved in the lecture that's again a point which somebody has made different ideas and solutions will come that's the point which somebody is making now creative assignments can be given every topic can be discussed with real examples so all of these let me now stop with the sending your responses on the chat so many of these good responses that have come that most people have noticed that what is happening as this scenario increases so one of the things that is happening in these scenarios is that the amount of time that the students are spending actively with the content instead of sitting passively and listening to the teacher the amount of time that the students are spending actively with engaging with the content that is one main thing that is increasing and the other main thing is that the complexity of situations that the students are dealing with so in the first case the students have no complexity to deal with they simply have to listen they have to really do nothing then when we come to the session for the scenario for we find that ok students are beginning to clarify their notes with each other and then all the way to students working in taking a decision about what method to use and then how to solve the problem and then actually solving the problem so the second big thing that is increasing is the complexity or with which the students are engaging with the content the time that they're spending and the complexity ok so to summarize many of these ideas what you would have noticed is as I was reading out the responses that came on chat you will have noticed that many of these ideas have already come up in the chat that you have been sending so you can stop with the sending of chat responses so essentially what is changing in the scenario is that students are doing more on their own so there is more doing on their own the nature of activities is also becoming more and more meaningful in the sense that it simply starts with look at what your neighbor has written then to say that write something discuss something solve a problem students are more engaged with the content as you go down the scenarios there is more collaboration that happens there's more discussions on the content with each other and finally there's more reflection that is happening so because the students are more engaged with the content there's more reflection about what is it that they're doing which solution is better and so on what's happening for the teacher now so for the teacher what's happening is there is much less talking so the teacher from having lectured for one hour is now lecturing only for 20 minutes and then facilitating a discussion so the teacher is becoming more of a facilitator in class but on the other hand the teacher has to do some work to think of these activities what will the student do so the teacher has to put in more thought outside of the class it's not it's no longer possible for the teacher to just come to the class because the teacher is an expert in the topic and simply start lecturing so it's no longer possible for the teacher to do that the teacher has to spend a lot more time outside of class in order to come up with these activities which make the student engage with the content so all this is fine all this is what is happening we have looked at scenarios we have looked at what is changing in the scenario and so on so now the question that naturally arises is that why what's the big deal so the real big deal here is that there is more active learning that happens in the classroom so the next question that we may have is that what is the advantage so before we do that let us look at what exactly is the meaning of active learning so active learning is an approach to teaching and learning whose goal is to engage students with the content why are specific activities designed by the teacher that gets students to talk write reflect and express their thinking so what we just now did a scenarios and think fair share is itself an active learning exercise because you had to think about the methods and then you had to think about what was increasing and then you had to share what you had come up with so that itself is an example of an active learning activity so there are some requirements of these active learning strategies the first one is that the inspector creates carefully designed activities that require the students to talk write and reflect and express their thinking and most of the students go beyond listening copying of notes and execution of prescribed procedures the other two points so many of us may feel that we are already doing this we may feel that I give a problem for students to solve so I do a tutorial in between in my class so many of those are valid strategies for engaging the student however in order to qualify to be called an active learning strategy the strategy has to be explicitly based on theories of learning so there are very various theories of how people learn and the strategy that is based on theories of learning for example which ensures that not too much cognitive overload happens or which ensures that the there is a zone of proximal development that takes place okay so the strategies based on theories of learning are called active learning strategies and also these strategies are evaluated repeatedly through empirical research so there are lot of studies that take place to compare these strategies with traditional lecturing and determine is there actually any benefit of doing these activities so benefit in fact can be considered from various perspectives benefit does not simply mean that does it help the student to score more marks in the exam that is just one way of a technique being more beneficial there could be benefits for example like students feel more engaged in the classroom there could be benefits like students are more motivated to work in that subject or students find the teacher interesting so these are all other types of benefits that we can also measure through empirical research so many informal strategies may have the goal of engaging students but to be termed as active learning they need to meet the above requirements so and here are some references from where you can learn more about the definition okay so now let's do a question so the question is that the teacher lectures initially every 20 minutes the teacher pauses and asks do you have any doubts okay three students raise their hands and the teacher resumes the lecture okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to post this question on the a view poll and participants can indicate your answer to your coordinator and coordinator can share the answer through this poll so let me just create the question let it see what the responses are we have about 97 responses with 45 saying yes and about 50 saying no I'll just give it another half a minute for the remaining centers also to send their response okay so now two centers that are here we have responses from nearly 230 centers where 120 centers are saying that the teacher is doing active learning and 100 centers are saying that the teacher is not doing active learning so let's move on important thing now is there is a recall on what is active learning so active learning is instructor creates carefully designed activities that require students to talk right reflect and express their thinking so majority of the students go beyond listening copying of notes execution of prescribed procedures okay so now that we have seen this definition okay what I'm going to do is I'm going to do the poll again okay so we'll keep this slide on I'll give you a minute to look at the slide where which gives the definition of active learning where one the instructor has to create activities that requires the students to write and express their thinking and to the students go beyond you know copying of notes asking of doubts and they actually do something with the content so what I'm going to do now is in the previous instance we had the result of the poll as nearly 50% each with the yes answers actually being a little higher what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull the same question again and now let us see what the responses are so what we have is this definition keep in mind now this is the definition okay the instructor creates activities that requires the students to write and express their thinking and students go beyond simply asking for clarifications and actually engage with the content in terms of solving some problem or discussion and so on so let us see what the result of the poll is now after having revisited the definition of active learning so it appears that the result has not changed very significantly as a result of looking at the definition okay so let me just now tell you that the answer here is no so those of you who are thinking that the answer is yes you need to revisit saying okay what is it that this teacher is doing to make students write or talk or express their thinking and the second thing is you need to also ask what is it what is the student doing beyond simply asking a clarification question okay so that is why the answer in this case is no and yeah so the instructor has to create carefully designed activities that requires students to talk write and reflect their thinking and majority of the students need to go beyond listening copying of so neither so this is not majority when three students in the class are simply asking questions first of all that's not majority and second of all they are also not going beyond listening or asking clarification questions so both of these things from the instructor side the carefully designed activities that require students to reflect their thinking and majority of the students being going beyond listening both of these are not happening in this instance where the teacher simply pauses and asks do you have any doubts okay so that is why this scenario is not an example of active learning so to summarize again the requirement of active learning strategies is that instructor has to create activities that require students to talk write reflect and express their thinking and majority of the students have to go beyond simply listening or asking clarifications then it is based on theories of learning and evaluated repeatedly through empirical research so now let us look at some of these techniques okay so before looking at the advantages of active learning itself so let's look at some standard points that we might have in our mind so for example I spend a lot of time preparing lectures many of us do that and typically we spend about four hours of preparation or anywhere from four to eight hours of preparation for a one-hour class right I deliver my lectures smoothly so all these are true for me also I show them demos and videos I often pause to ask students if they have understood the material students can even interrupt me with doubts I never hesitated to answer students questions okay so all of these are actions which any good teacher would take in the classroom anybody who is diligent about their teaching and about anybody who is keenly interested in students learning the subject well would do all of these things okay so the question here is that why isn't this enough the point is that we point is not that we should stop doing this we do need to do all of this but the point is so this is a necessary condition but it is not a sufficient condition why is it not enough so let's look at some empirical results which will bring us to the why of active learning so here is one result so this may take you a little bit of time to process the material on the slide so let me just help you with understanding what is being said there so there was a experiment that was conducted in one case so there were two videos of the same instructor teaching the same subject so same instructor and same subject there were two groups that were created for one group the instructor spoke very fluently he did a great job of delivery of the lecture so spoke fluently did not take notes stood properly maintained eye contact with the students so essentially did all of what was there here that we feel is to helping students to understand in the other video it was the same instructor in the same topic but in this case the instructor spoke very haltingly started saying a lot of you know this is how it happens and so spoke very disfluently and then often looked at notes had poor body language didn't make eye contact with the students all of that so this is actually a bad lecture so to speak okay so badly delivered lecture but the content and the topic everything was the same then what they did in this experiment was that they measured what is the student performance by a test on the topic it turns out that what would be expect you would expect that group one should do better than group two because the instructor did a much superior job of delivering the lecture the instructor spoke very fluently maintained eye contact and did all of that so the expected thing is that learning should be greater for group one and learning should be less for group two it turns out that even if you ask students feel that they have learned more in the group one but if you look at the exam performance it turns out that the performance is the same for both the groups so the actual learning so there is a difference between what is called perceived learning perceived learning is how much I think I have learned and actual learning actual learning is how much I am able to demonstrate in the exam so the perceived learning I may think that I have learned but unless I am asked to demonstrate through some kind of a test I really don't know how much I have learned so the actual learning is measured by the test whereas the perceived learning can be measured by asking students how much do you think did you understand this lecture well and questions like that okay so it turns out that the actual learning for both the groups turned out to be the same so basic point that is being made here is that better quality of delivery of lectures does not lead to better learning so the point to understand is that we are continuously focusing on ourselves as teachers we are always focusing on ourselves saying how can I improve my lecture how can I improve my lecture what example can I give how can I speak where should I modulate my voice how should I pause no where should I suddenly tell a joke lot of things like that we keep focusing on ourselves but what this experiment shows is that while that is a good thing it is good that you do all that but it does not necessarily lead to better learning okay this experiment does not mean that it's okay to lecture badly that's not the interpretation of the experiment the experiment simply means that continuously improving the delivery of the lecture does not lead to better learning so now if we compare lectures with active learning strategy so for example one of that we have already seen two active learning strategies in this session one was the think-pair share and the other was the pole that we just did okay so comparing both of these things so these are topics from physics of topics of force acceleration and velocity so now if you look at how much did the students were able to score before the instruction before any instruction this is actually called a pre-test okay so this black mark that you see which is the lowest in all the three cases indicates the pre-test and then the in between one which is the gray one which shows how much they improve after the lecture so in this case this is the traditional lecture by traditional lecture what we mean is that the teacher gives the lecture and periodically ask students did you understand or periodically ask students do you have any doubts so then you find that the increase is appears to be marginal on the other hand when there are some active learning techniques that are done like for example think-pair share or making students debate on a topic or making students to solve a real-life problem what you find is that the gain is much much larger so and clearly even without the statistical numbers in this case it one can believe that this gain is going to be a statistically significant as well as it's going to be reasonable effect size so what we find is that the gain is pretty large when we are doing active learning as compared to simply doing traditional instruction okay so let me tell you about one more such large-scale study so this study was conducted across 6542 students and over 62 courses in physics and many of these instructors who taught all these courses were had one best teacher awards in their institute and so on so out of these 14 of them did traditional lecture and 48 of them did active learning strategies so what do we mean by traditional lecture now the definition of traditional lecture includes asking of doubts and also include allowing students to ask doubts okay so includes saying he do you understand so giving a great lecture with pauses and asking students did you understand and clarifying their doubts is a traditional lecture and doing less of lecturing and doing more of problem solving and such activities in the classroom is an active learning strategy so what we find here is that the case of when we again once again use the similar pre-test and a post-test model we find that how much did the students learn so just like what we had seen what was the difference between the students knowledge before the lecture and what was the difference between the students knowledge after the lecture so this is measured by a value called gain okay so this is the formula we will not go into the details of how this formula is computed what it implies and all so all that we want to understand here is that this gain measures what is the difference how much is the student actually learned in the as a result of the lecture so it turns out that when people are doing traditional lecturing this is the gain actually the x-axis here is the gain okay and the y-axis is the fraction of courses that are having that game so if you look at the x-axis what you find is that for traditional lectures even though these were excellent teachers there is the gain is capped at point to it so however good delivery that the teacher may be doing because the students are simply sitting there passively and listening and they are thinking that they they are able to follow the lecture the actual performance of the student in the exam is not affected very significantly on the other hand if you look at active learning strategies you find that there's a huge spectrum of game so the gain can be all the way from point two to point seven so what this shows is that active learning even if it is combined with slightly less than perfect lecturing does have a lot of gain on the other hand the moment we start introducing active learning a little more seriously in our courses so the gain increases much significantly so this is basically another representation of this graph that we saw earlier where the active learning has a lot of gain over compared to traditional instruction so only thing is in this case we are talking about view experiment whereas in this case these measurements are made over 62 courses and 6000 students and variety of institutions and variety of teachers okay so the point that is being made here is basically that it is desirable to incorporate active learning strategies into our classroom so we may be excellent lecturers we may have a lot of interest we may be able to give fantastic lectures we may be able to engage the students attention very well we may have them completely listening to us for the entire class even for such instructors it is desirable to incorporate active learning strategies because even if you are that instructor the gain as far as these results which are a very large study show that will be around point three whereas if the same instructor were to incorporate some active learning strategies the chances are that that instructors gain will be around point six to point seven okay so that is the key point that we are making here okay now let's look at some basis of active learning strategies so what is the instructor basically doing here the instruction is informed and explicitly guided by research regarding students pre instruction knowledge state and learning process okay so this may sound like a very complex sentence for people not used to education technology terminology basically what this means is that you create your lecture or activity that you do in the classroom based on what the student knows already and also based on how the learning process takes place so the basis is that for example specific learning difficulties related to particular concepts so there may be data on on the fact that for example here students typically find recursion as a difficult concept to understand okay so students often confuse the concept of recursion with the concept of iteration which are two entirely different concepts but simply because there is the notion of some sort of a loop happening in both the cases students think that this is also a loop okay so that is a specific learning learning difficulty related to a particular concept then there are specific ideas and knowledge elements that are potentially productive and useful so for example you may feel that even though it is computer programming it is still desirable for students to learn about sorting so that learning about sorting is a specific knowledge element that is useful for students across a lot of disciplines okay and then it takes about students beliefs what they need to do in order to learn and their general reasoning process so now once again to summarize at this point what we have is that active learning what we have seen so far is what is active learning active learning is basically getting the students to engage with the content getting them to do some activity in the classroom which forces them to work with the content and discover how much they have understood okay why should we do active learning that also we have seen that there are great benefits of doing this the learning gains most important thing that we are interested in is for our students to score well in the exams and we find that even in that case there are a lot of learning gains and now what we want to see is how do we do this in our classroom so let us say we are great instructors in when it comes to lecturing let us see how to incorporate active learning in the classroom so the key elements of active learning strategies here are students are going to engage in problem solving activity during the class time okay not after the class time it's during the class time during is important and the problems are posed in a variety of contexts often in real-life context so specific student ideas are elicited and addressed and often students are asked to figure things out for themselves so students are given open-ended problems they're asked to figure it out for themselves they're asked to express their reasoning explicitly students work collaboratively and they receive rapid feedback on their work here are some strategy that can help you to implement active learning in programming here are some things that we can do so we'll do a little bit more of this in the following sessions but right now on this particular slide I'll just list some of these activities and do some examples of them so for example one thing that you could do in the classroom is to pose a problem and ask students to begin the problem solution so for example you may say that I have you know I I given an array find a mechanism by which the array can be sorted in increasing order so you could ask students to begin the problem solution so what will happen in this case is that the students will actually start saying that okay I will find the smallest element of the array so some students will come up with one of the sorting algorithms some other student may come up with a different sorting algorithm so the beginning of the problem solution can start and based on what is your intention you can choose one of those steps that the students have given to then keep them engaged as you go on in that class the next strategy that you could use or another strategy that you could use is ask students to complete the last two steps in the problem okay so in this case you may say that you may describe a technique at the pseudo code level for example you may say that if I am going to do insertion sort you may describe insertion sort using using an example and then you may show some code of the insertion sort and say that okay what is the final code that has to be written here so that this program works like insertion sort okay so that is asking students to complete the last two steps in the problem and this figuring out the next step in the derivation is also a similar strategy it's not particularly applicable in the context of CS 101 because we really don't do too much of derivation in CS 101 but it will be applicable in other CS courses for example when there are proofs involved then you could ask students to devise possible reasons for an observation so in this case it should it could be shown in a video or these observations could be shown as part of your classroom demonstration so many of us now when we teach computer programming we do project the actual code blocks or genie or whatever environment that we are using we do project the actually the execution of a program right so what we could do is we could show a program we could show its output and ask students to devise saying okay why did this program give this output which will be a mechanism to engage students with the content the other thing that we can do is instead of simply showing them the result and asking them to devise the reason we can pause the program and ask students to predict the outcome of the program okay so again in this case the program can be shown in a video or an animation or you could actually do a live demo of the code execution then another method that you could use is to ask students to brainstorm a list of methods to solve a design problem so for example you may say that okay I want to design a database I want to implement the contacts information on a phone so this can be coming towards the end of a computer programming course and you can ask students to come up with a list of methods saying okay what data structures will you use to store this information what else will you do in order to solve the problem and then finally you can get students to debate the pros and cons of various methods okay so now this debate actually is a good tool I mean debating pros and cons of various methods in technical terms it actually gets students to work at what is called the evaluate level of the cognitive cognitive levels okay so it makes students go beyond simply understanding what the teacher is saying beyond the understand level beyond being able to replicate what the teacher has said in the exam but to actually think about what are the pros and cons so the so this again you could do as a as an example what I had already mentioned that you could say when to use an array versus when to use a link list so such a debate could be done in the classroom so these are some ways some activities that you could use to implement active learning in your class so what we will be doing in today's sessions is we will be taking two such three such activities one is called think-pair share another is called peer instruction and both of them we will combine together in the last one which is called a flip classroom okay and we will be talking about these activities in the session you will also be doing exercises during the sessions as well as in the lab regarding these activities and creating your own questions which you can use in your classroom okay so now let's do one more activity which is also a think-pair share activity now what happens is that in this activity let me read out for those of okay you get excited about active learning strategies that you learnt in this workshop so far and you go back to your college and tell your colleagues about it okay your colleague however expresses this concern that students are used to being lectured okay they will not like to do anything more in class so active learning strategies will not work okay so now the question is do you agree with your colleague and write your opinion along the reason behind it that is the what we need to do so now by now you are familiar with this concept of think-pair share in the think phase you have to think individually and come up with your own reason and then only go on to the pair in the share phase okay so we will give you a minute to think about whether you agree with this statement that students are used to being lectured they will not like to do anything more in class so active learning strategies will not work somebody has made that statement so the question is that do you agree with it or not and if you agree why if you don't agree why not so moving on to the next phase that if your partner or your neighbor cares the same opinion as you okay so if you both have different opinions one of you says that it will work one of you says it will not work then discuss your respective reasons with each other okay so if one of you if both of you are saying that it will work then you are perhaps okay but if one of you is saying that it will not work now come up with one way to address the problem race so for example one person may say that students are used to being lectured they won't do anything so active learning will not work and so come up with a way to ensure that students will do something more than simply listening to lectures in class so again I'll give you some two three minutes to do this okay so I'm already seeing a lot of responses on the chat forum saying that active learning most people many people think that it will be difficult to implement and so on okay so now as a class what we want to do is we want to devise ways to address this concern so the question is no longer whether you agree with it or not so the question is that let us say assume that your class your college management and principal have discovered that there are great benefits to active learning and they are saying that all of you must implement active learning and now we have to come up with ways to address this fact that students are used to being lectured so irrespective of whether you agree with active learning or not we have to find a way what are ways by which we can get students to do work in class rather than simply listen okay one of you has posted a good question about active learning which I will take up in about five minutes saying that okay how much time does the active learning activity itself take okay so let me start reading out some of the responses one of the responses if students are motivated enough then they will be they will definitely participate another response is that we can do traditional lecturing half the class and then active learning the other half of the class some people are saying according to the hours allotted and work schedule it is a bit difficult so I will address that point later on others are giving examples like possible ways are brainstorming if we follow active learning we can do more number of classes it will help so coming back to what is it that we can get students to do how do we get students to do somebody else who is saying 80% of teaching and 20% of activity so the active learning mechanism actually says the opposite saying the 20% of teaching and 80% of activity okay so we can stop sending responses on chat and the key point here is that you need students to have some buy-in into this technique okay into active learning why are you doing this in class when they are used to coming to class and simply sitting there and you know sometimes taking notes or sometimes simply play playing with their devices now suddenly we are saying that turn to your neighbor do this do that and so on so what is important is to get the students to buy in so one way of doing this is to create it by explaining why you are doing active learning and better still we can demonstrate why you are doing active learning by doing some activity so which is what we have done in this session itself when we have had to think pressure activities and we have had one peer instruction activity which is the poll that we conducted okay so we have actually demonstrated how to do active learning so many many of you are having questions that how to do active learning in a CS class so some of that we will take up in the next session let me do some of the other questions here so let me read out the question so one question is that sometimes you have to complete our syllabus within a given time and active learning requires a lot of time so how can we estimate our time while delivering lectures through active learning strategy okay so this is a common query that is there in most of our minds so when we started implementing active learning techniques we also had the same query in our minds okay so the point here is what you will find once you start implementing active learning is that you actually have to do less so even though you may have budgeted let's say two or three classes for a particular topic the moment you flip it around and you get students to work on the topic you will find that you don't have to do so much lecturing so students themselves will be able to get a lot of the advanced topics on their own because of the activities that you have designed rather than because of the explanations that you are giving okay so it turns out that the syllabus gets completed not only in time but it can also get completed at a far greater depth than if we were to do traditional lecturing so this is an actual finding and the only way for you to verify this for yourself is to right now believe the finding and try it out yourself otherwise no amount of you know my showing data or my telling you that I do this in my class I have seen it and all that may may not be as useful as you trying it out in your class many of you have even good responses to the think-pair share activity so like for example somebody is saying that active learning improves the class performance as non-participating students get involved and everybody learns a lot from the process somebody else is saying that active learning is possible either during the lab session or in a few lectures during the entire semester so here again I would like to point out that active learning is not something which you do separately from your class okay so if you do active learning only in a few lectures you will find that it does not work okay because what will happen is the students are not used to the technique so if you just do it as an experiment in one lecture the students also need time to get used to what you are doing so you need to implement this technique so even if the active learning is something as simple as posing a question having students to vote on it getting them to discuss and then having them to vote again unless you do it repeatedly the students will not get used to the technique so saying that okay I will do lecturing for most of my lectures and once in a while I will do some active learning is unlikely to work there is a question which says is active learning possible for every subject the answer is yes but we will not go into anything beyond computer programming or computer science as far as this workshop is concerned so many of you seem to have this concern that if active learning is followed then syllabus completion will be the problem okay so let me repeat here that if when you implement active learning what will what you will find is that you have to do less of lecturing students discover a lot of information on their own so syllabus completion is unlikely to be a problem even though it may seem at this point that yes it might be a problem unless you once you start implementing it that is when you will discover that it's really not a problem so somebody else is asking the question that is it okay to do this for 25 minutes of a in a class so that is actually correct that in a one-hour class if you do about 20 to 30 minutes of active learning and you know start with a 10 minute lecturing do some 20 to 30 minutes of active learning again summarize with a 10 minute of lecturing something of that sort is actually a good plan okay let me look at a few questions and then we'll take a break okay there is an important point here which says that the active learning will work only for less number of students in the class so that every student gets more time so again here the point is that active learning is not about the teacher individually giving time to all the students okay so active it's not necessary that you have to talk to each and every student as long as you are able to get the students to talk to each other that is also active learning so they also learn from their peers so as it is it's anyway happening when they are preparing for exams so what we are doing is we are just simply bringing it into the classroom and carrying out that activity also so to give you a concrete example I have implemented these techniques in a class of 250 students for computer programming and even in such a large class you will find that students talk to each other active learning works pretty well it's I don't have to really put in any of my time into making the class making students talk to each other so many people are saying it's not possible to have active learning in all lectures but we can have two or three sessions in a semester so let me reemphasize that if we have active learning only two or three times a semester it's not much different from doing a problem solving tutorial okay so in that case you are better off simply doing the problem solving tutorial so do trying it out as something which you will occasionally do is unlikely to give you the benefit what is important is to do it let's say at least in every alternate class to begin with if not in every class so what I do in when I teach computer programming is that I have at least two activities in each class so even if you and there is really no difficulty my syllabus gets completed much before schedule and all of that okay students go to much greater depth for example they do sorting algorithms they do link list they do implementation of stack all of this is slightly beyond the regular syllabus of computer programming okay so this happens because I have at least two activities to be done in every class so even if you don't want to do two activities in every class if you plan your course in such a way that you have at least one activity in every class or one activity in every two classes then you will start seeing the benefits of active learning if you have one or two activities a semester you are not going to see anything any benefit out of this technique students are going to simply say that okay this is another tutorial or some one of those problem solving sessions that the instructor is having okay so how to convince the colleagues our colleagues regarding the implications of active learning strategy is again an important question that many of us if you're implementing it and all our colleagues are doing other things our colleagues first of all may ask that why are you doing all this secondly what will what might happen is there may be a lot of talking happening in your class and people may think that you really are not teaching but something else is going on in the class so the easiest way to convince your colleagues is to get the students to see the benefit of active learning so once the students see the benefit of this technique they in turn start asking other teachers also to do such strategies in their classroom so this is one of the things that is happening at IIT Bombay also where students write in the course evaluation that this think-pair-share method was excellent and more instructors should start using such a method and then it turns out that more and more people start having buy-in into these techniques okay so at this point I'll stop with the queries because I'm getting more opinions rather than queries so some people are saying that okay we think active learning will not work in sections more than 30 students so at this point I can only say that active learning does work there are studies which show that it does work in large classes also and there are mechanisms of implementing it in large classes okay and all of these we will see in the subsequent sessions okay let me just wait a minute or so to see if there are any other questions which we can there is a question on how do we conduct active learning for data structures that is difficult to understand so one way of conducting this for motivating such data structures so the way I do it I can only answer from the point of view of what I would do so the way I do it is by posing a problem which motivates the need for the data structure which so suppose they have learned a bunch of data structures till then so let's say they have learned about arrays they have learned about linklase and now you want to teach them about the data structure of a queue okay so what I do is pose a problem which motivates the need for a queue where we find that this array or linklase or whatever data structures that they have learned is not exactly very efficient so the need for the data structure once they understand then it's very easy to simply tell them that a queue is nothing but a first in first out kind of a mechanism you can implement it in either using an array or using a linklase and that's the way that data structures can be addressed okay so there is another question here which is asking how to measure the outcome of active learning apart from pre and post survey so this is a good question there are multiple ways in which to measure this so one way is to measure the perception of the students so the students you can conduct a survey to find out what do students think about it do they feel that it helps them to understand the subject better do they feel that it helps them to be more engaged with the content or pay more attention in the class or motivates them to come to class so that is one set of metrics can be around this perception metrics another set of metrics can be from the perspective of the instructor where the instructors feeling that okay did it help making my class more interactive did it help me in reducing the amount of effort that I put in during the class so the instructor instructors perception can be another thing that is measured and the third thing can be actual performance which is the how much are the students storing scoring in the exams on that topic so that's those are ways in which the outcome of active learning can be measured okay so there is one more point which is saying that okay active learning itself is a time-consuming activity so again I would like to re-emphasize here that if you think of active learning as something that you do in addition to lectures then it will appear to be a time-consuming activity if you think of it as something that substitutes for your extensive lecturing and where you reduce the amount of time that you lecture but you create activities which help students to learn the concept and then only have to your only task is to then summarize what they have learned okay so in that case the active learning does not take more time so let me give you a concrete example here in one class like when I was talking about sorting algorithms just a while ago so in one of the classes I did give this question of given an array what are the ways in which you will sort the array as a think share activity so students had to initially think of and come up with some method of sorting without worrying about how the code looks so many of them would come up with insertion sort some others would come up with selection sort some others would come up with any of the one of the other sorting mechanisms okay so nobody really comes up with quick sort in such a question now in the pair phase you say that okay now two of you together write a little bit of the C++ code for the sorting algorithm that you have chosen okay be it insertion selection whatever okay so many of them even come up with bubble sort and some of the basic algorithms they discover so at the end of one class which is maybe an hour or slightly more than one hour when you have finished discussing the ideas that the students have come up with and you have finished talking about how the code should look like what you find is that the entire class has now learned three or four sorting algorithms now if this were to be done in pure lecturing what you would have to do is you would have to spend time setting up the problem talking about describing insertion sort describing selection sort describing bubble sort describing merge sort so this actually would at least take about two hours of lecturing to simply just describe how the sorting mechanisms work okay so on the other hand since I did this as an active learning strategy a thing pair share activity it took 20 minutes for the activity to happen where in different groups came up with different sorting algorithms another 20 minutes for the discussion where groups were able to see the other others ideas of how the sorting algorithm works and my finally summarizing and doing a code walk through of these sorting algorithms in the last 20 minutes so in about an hour this entire topic of sorting algorithms could be covered so that's why the point is that active learning techniques don't take additional time provided you reduce the amount of time that you actually do in lecturing okay so there's one more question which is important which says is it enough to use such activities in the first few lectures to create interest for the subject so once again why do you want to stop with simply creating interest for the subject yes such activities help to create in interest for the subject but once you have created the interest you might as well continue to exploit the power of the activities where students are talking to each other and solving problems in in the class in order to get more than simply interest for the subject okay so I think this is the book time for us to stop and many of these other queries that we see we will also be addressing in the subsequent sessions so instead of simply bombarding you with all the information right now I think this is a good time so it's about been about one and a half an hour since we started so we'll stop here we'll take a break for tea whatever time is tea and we will reconvene immediately after tea


In this section, we want to look at not only emission spectra, but what causes things to appear the color that they are. For example, why is this blue and this pink and this green?


Our next caller is Andrew from Texas. What's up, Andrew? How can we help you? Hey guys, thanks for having me on. I am brand new to weightlifting. I think my girlfriend, not so subtly, introduced me to y'all two months ago. And so in the first month, I spent my time just working on owning the movement as you talk about stability and flexibility. So I could do compound lifts. And then about a month ago, I started a max aesthetic. I'm absolutely loving it. But one thing I've noticed is I've gone from about six to seven hours of sleep a night to about eight to nine hours. And I'm also now taking like a 20 minute nap at least once a day. And want to know if this is probably just an adjustment period because my body's taken on, you know, those extra stress and working out. Or if you guys see this long term, is this what happens with weightlifters? Yeah. So I have two questions for you. First of all, sleeping eight to eight hours a night is usually better than six to seven for most people. But you're also taking a nap. So I need to ask you two other two questions. Number one, are you doing this because you're tired? Are you finding that you're more fatigued? And then number two, are you noticing consistent strength gains in MAPS aesthetic? Oh yeah. So to answer the second question first, absolutely. I'm putting on, you know, I'm adding more weight to my lifts. It seems like every time I go out, those newbie gains you talk about have been great. It's really just, I feel like my body's been exhausted. And so I mean, I'm going, I feel like I lay down and I fall asleep like that. It's great. It's just something I'm not used to. Like I said, I went from pretty much not working out at all to now doing MAPS aesthetic. And I'm like eight weeks into, I guess, weightlifting now. And so I feel like it's just my body adjusting to the extra stress and movement. What's your caffeine intake look like? I pretty much just take pre-workout right before my lift and that's it. Okay. Now, before when you were sleeping six to seven hours a night, did you feel like you needed more or did you feel like you were fine? I think I needed more. I just think I just literally wasn't sleeping as much before probably because I had more of a sedentary lifestyle. And now that I'm breeding you guys as nutrition guide and I'm going, I'm listening to your podcast a lot more. I'm starting to take like walks in like every hour at work and stuff like that. So I just feel like I'm moving more. And I'm also, I'm also now in a calorie deficit if that contributes at all. Okay. Well, that's contribute. Yeah. And so could the pre-workout too? Yeah, well, so I, so here's the thing. If you weren't getting stronger, I would say it's probably too much to have you back off. But there's a couple of things you said that makes me think that your body needs the rest and it's good for you. One is you're getting stronger, right? So if you're getting stronger, you're, you're usually not over-training. In fact, I'd say you're probably not over-training.  So that's a good thing.  Studies show that when people work out, especially when they do resistance training, they get better deeper, you know, types of sleep. So the sleep is more recuperative and the body just seems to, you know, be able to sleep better. So this doesn't sound like a bad thing.  And, and, you know, that might even still be the case. Maps aesthetic is still a lot of volume for a first time workout. I mean, I would have had you start with maps anabolic and then maybe eventually move you to maps aesthetic, but the fact that you're getting stronger every single time, I think this is probably, you're probably okay. I would also investigate more of the caffeine intake. So if he said he's new to lifting, so I'm assuming you weren't taking a pre-workout six months ago. Correct. Okay. And now, were you a coffee drinker before at all? No. Okay. So you take a guy, okay, who's never had caffeine, probably on some 200 and plus milligrams of caffeine. That's a lot of caffeine in those drinks. Yes. And a lot of times when you, especially that much caffeine and somebody who's not used to always taking it, you can have this, you know, tons of energy from it and then a hard crash come from it afterwards. So I would actually recommend like either one theanine, which you are a big advocate of, of taking that with his pre-workout. So a theanine to kind of keep a more even kill and, or maybe even replacing the pre-workout with something more like red juice or something out or cordyceps or something along those lines. Yeah. You could try, you could definitely mess with those two things. But I mean, the fact that you're getting stronger as consistently as you are, that's a good sign. That's the best sign. And I can think of a more objective positive sign that it's working. And I actually went through, like, I go through spells of this too. And I forget that I'm in a deficit and I'm actually lowering my calorie intake and wondering why, you know, towards the end of the night, like I'm getting really tired. And after my workouts, especially, and that was definitely one of those things that a factor in that whole equation that, you know, is something that has repeated itself from showed itself for me. But definitely the caffeine thing is a real thing, especially if you're not used to it, like there is an inevitable crash, especially with those types of caffeine products. I would also, so what, can we get your, your weight and how much do you weigh right now? And then what, what the calorie intake looks like? Yeah. So I'm 511. I weigh 200 pounds and I'm getting like 1800 to 1900 calories. Okay. Yeah. And that's a cut from what you were at before. Okay.  If you're on a cut and you're getting stronger though, that's a really good, that's the strength part is what, what tells me you're doing okay. If you're, if you've got the new beginning, yeah, you're not even, you're not gonna, this might not always be the case, but you could take a newbie and you could over train them. They're not going to get stronger. They're going to be sore. They're going to feel terrible. So the fact that you're getting strong now, if you stop getting stronger or you start going backwards, I would scale the volume down because it might be too much or bump the calories. Okay. Thanks guys. I appreciate all that you do. No problem. Thank you. Yeah.  Maps aesthetic is a great workout program, but it's, it's probably not the one that I would start with. Right. It's a lot of volume right out of the shoes. Yeah, I would go Maps Anabolic. Maps Anabolic is, is a great way to start. I mean, Maps Anabolic is a great program period. You can go back to it even if you're advanced to get great gains.  No, no, I mean, I'm over covered. No, I agree. We all agree that. I mean, we, it should be addressed, right? Because obviously we always have new audience. The way the programs, we originally wrote Maps Anabolic performance and aesthetic to be followed in that order. So even though there's exceptions to the role, and yes, you can, some people can start in their places. The thought process when we thought about the amount of volume that is in each one of those programs and the things that we are addressing with each one of those programs, the ideal thing for most people is to go anabolic performance and then aesthetic. I, you know, a couple of things we didn't get the chance to say. So hopefully Andrew listens to this. I would also have like three days in a row where I give myself a calorie surplus just to see what happens. He might be 1800 calories is pretty low for a 200 pound young man that's lifting five to six days a week. I would rather see him somewhere on a cut like 22 to 2300 maybe, you know, and again, these are generic numbers. I don't know where his metabolism metabolism is currently at. So I'm just throwing stuff out there. But that's a pretty low calorie intake. And that could be a big part of it. And then again, the caffeine, he wasn't taking caffeine in it at all. And also you take two, 300 milligrams. I'm wondering if he started his workouts, he's never worked out before, and then added the pre-workout like doesn't really drink caffeine, like both of those right out of the shoots. It's like, it would have been interesting to see if he just worked out without any kind of like stimulant. Yeah. Or like the red juice. That's why I would push him in the direction of trying that out and seeing how he feels with that or messing with theanine or quarter steps in there. I just think that maybe that, I'm thinking of the nap, right? Because the sleeping at night, that's great. If you're getting eight, nine hours of sleep, I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, I think it's probably really good for him. His body's wanting to recover. His strength is going up. Like you're saying, the only thing that I would try and figure out or get to the bottom of is the midday nap. And the midday nap could be just we're so low of calories or I've all of a sudden went from never taking caffeine to taking, you know, 300 milligrams of caffeine. And it's the crash that he's feeling. If he probably trains it early in the morning, it sounds like. So earlier in the day, takes this huge spike by noon or one is feeling tired. Yeah. But I mean, here's the deal. Going, leapfrogging a program doesn't get you there any faster too. That's something that I think is important to explain. So if maps and a polych is appropriate for you and the progression is anabolic to perform as to aesthetic, jumping to aesthetic doesn't mean you get there faster. It actually means you get there slower because you started with a program that wasn't the perfect dose or the right dose, you know, this is for your body. This is something that's Katrina, right?  And she had to reset and I made her start with starter. And she's never ran starter before.  And I kept telling and I'm asking her as she's going, she's now in the third week of starter right now, go, What are you seeing? Are you still getting sore? She goes, Yeah, no, the, I mean, the workouts that when I'm doing them, I feel like they're too easy and too basic. But I do get sore from it. I said, then why, why would we go to anabolic yet when you're still seeing these results? And she's so antsy to get there. I'm like, you're seeing progression right now. Totally. There's no reason to do that.


to my channel. Today's video is going to be in kind of two parts the first half being a wrap-up of what I read in October and the second half being my November TBR and I'm doing it this way because I don't think either of these ideas really have enough for me to make them separate videos plus I have a lot of video ideas planned for the next coming weeks and so I want to make sure I get them all done before the new year happens. So we're kind of squishing these two videos into one quick side note before we begin now. Yes, I do still have my Halloween decorations up and the next day or so my husband and I will be de-decorating the fall from our apartment and redecorating with winter slash Christmas. So for now they're still up but when I do next week's video they will not be up. That was just kind of a sign note but I figure like if I'm doing my October wrap-up it's okay to still have the spooky decorations. So jumping right into it the first book that I finished in the month of October was Spin the Dawn by Elizabeth Lim. I gave this book initially five stars but I'm thinking of bumping it down to four just because a lot of times when I finish a book I have an initial like powerful feeling afterwards and I rate based on that but then after a little time goes by and I reflect I realize you know the ending may have been great but once I think about the entire book was a really five stars. I did however love this book and I agree with what I have been saying beforehand before I read this book and what other people have been saying that it is very much like Project Oneway meets Mulan with the fact that the main character Maya dresses up as her brother in order to compete in the emperor's competition to find a new tailor and because she is a woman she's not allowed to be a master tailor but she is pretty good and she comes her father is an amazing tailor as well. The only thing is that when I hear this description you know I think oh that's super exciting but it really only encompassed the first half of the book. The competition is over once you reach halfway through the book and then you start on another plot point that was just as fun and interesting. It just kind of felt weird to have one arc stop and then another arc with the same characters and everything so it wasn't super crazy but just keep in mind that that's kind of how the book setups is that there's a competition and then there's something that happens afterwards and they both take up about half of the book. I really enjoyed it. It does really have that like has a couple tropes of oh he's so dark and mysterious I'm not gonna fall for him and then you do because he's dark and mysterious. It has that trope it has that trope which normally makes me roll my eyes and I did add a couple moments in here but overall I didn't hate it. I don't know I guess Elizabeth Lim just kind of played the trope off a little better than other authors have in the past for me and then there was also the trope of she doesn't necessarily think I'm different I'm special but some people do say you know she is different she is special because of her magical scissors that she is able to use so there's a little bit of that trope but not a lot which is why I still rated this book four out of five plus just made me very happy and I loved the little bits of magic in here it's not overwhelmingly magic but there are little bits of it in here. The next book that I finished reading was in real life and this is by Corey Doctorow and Jenn Wang. Again I gave this four out of five stars because I loved it so the main character is a girl who has a speaker come to her school and she talks about this video game and how they're encouraging other young women to play this video game in order to boost their self-confidence. So her main character does and it's really cool to watch her go through this transformation of becoming more confident as this is her in real life and this is her character and it's really cool to kind of see how she morphs into her character in real life for the better. However this book does deal with some issues that I wish it had um I dove in more into. It kind of scratches the surface of it of the issue of um other players from around the world and why they play video games rather than just to have fun but more so as a source of money um and the illegality of their jobs um so I feel like it was very distant from that problem so I think if the book had been longer if this graphic novel had been longer then it could have dived in a little deeper to that issue and kind of not made it so surface level. That's kind of my only critique otherwise I loved it I loved the art style uh very precious and I really want a lot of young women to read this especially if you are interested in video games. The next book that I read that I want to talk about is when I got from the library and that's dream a little dream and this was a book translated from German into English. I read it in English and I gave it three out of five stars because I feel that it was the beginning to a trilogy but it didn't kick start the plot enough for me so she it's about a girl who her and her younger sister um travel a lot because their parents are divorced and both parents travel a lot due to their jobs but they finally settle in with their mom who is going to move in with her new boyfriend and his kids and so you kind of got that reality of life as well as going to a new school being in a new country um but she has the ability to walk into people's dreams and there's some kind of dealings with the devil a little bit that she kind of gets mixed up in which sounds really fun but when I read the book it was not as interesting as the summary made it seem which is kind of bummer but you know we're gonna go with it so I'm not going to pick up the next book in the trilogy I'm gonna put the trilogy down um it did not have enough of a cliffhanger for me to continue to want to read it unfortunately but it was still a pretty good book I think it's more on me than the book per se which is why I still read three out of five stars then the last book that I read in October is the one that is featured in my Halloween vlog slash a Catherine House vlog because all I did was read this book so this is Catherine House and it was written by Elizabeth Thomas I read this book all on Halloween and I gave it three out of five stars but I'm thinking about lowering it down to two stars because I really did not enjoy this book very much uh I do go into quite an in-depth summary in that video so if you want to go ahead and check that out so you can see what my thoughts were while I was reading it and when I finished it versus what they were at the very beginning before I knew very much about it so Catherine House is like a school kind of like a university except smaller and it's a house rather than saying they're a university or college and it's very hard to get into but if you do and you graduate you're supposed to uh get a really good job and get lots of money and blah blah blah but if you don't graduate something mysterious happens it's a dark academia except that I never got the vibe that something bad would ever happen to anyone until like the very end and even then I just had a hard time understanding this book the main character was extremely repetitive in her actions I felt like it wasn't very interesting I felt like there wasn't much plot except for like one point here one point here um and that just kind of wasn't enough to keep the story going for me I also feel like it had a very dud dull ending with not much of a climax to it and even then like I said I just don't understand a lot of what the book was trying to do and I felt like the writing style also wasn't my favorite there were a lot of uh things in here that I felt were unnecessary or weren't well explained um so I just had a very hard time keeping with this book again I could I talk more about it in my uh vlog uh that I posted last week so go there for like more extreme detail but for now I personally did not enjoy this book as much as I was hoping to now we're going to move on to my november tv r and if you've been following my channel that you know that each month I had been trying to read a different genre um I had to forego this during august in september and a little bit october because of covid affecting libraries as well as me moving um and so I wasn't able to fill those as much as I wanted october I didn't get to because I'm still waiting for the books that I ordered for october to read horror thriller but I am happy to say that for november I will be continuing on so november's theme is mysteries and I chose this because I thought it would be a very good wind down from halloween mystery still has a small spooky element but not near as much as horror and thriller or dark academia does um but it's still something that I thought would be a very good genre to read in fall so I will be reading some mystery books the first of the mystery books the first two books that I'm going to be reading are actually agatha christie books and I have this beautiful edition of murder on the orient express and other efecul poho mysteries and so like I said it obviously has murder on the orient express except that I read that last year last spooky season and so the it's the other mysteries in this particular edition that I will be reading there are two more in here the first is the murder of roger echeloroyd and I actually started that yesterday so I have already begun my november tbr and then the last book in this edition is curtain poho's last case um also look at the inside of this book it's so cute it's such a beautiful edition so I have two agatha christie books that I will be reading for the month of november but then I also have another classic mystery that I will be reading and this one's a chunky one because it's the complete sherlock holmes volume two by sir arthur conan doil um yeah so I don't have volume one and I don't have the dust jacket for volume two because I got this in a thrift store and so this is how it came and I was like oh my gosh I just want it so I have it this is huge it's 600 pages long but only 500 pages of it is actual story um so I will be making my way through this as best I can throughout the month of november I don't think I really need to explain too much about Sherlock Holmes so I'm not going to I am hoping to pick up at least another book I'm thinking maybe one of us's line I might pick that up on audiobook if I can't get the physical copy I would like to pick up other mystery books throughout the month of November but I don't own very many and I don't know very many because I don't read mystery so if you have any mystery recommendations please leave them down below otherwise if I don't get very many recommendations or the ones I do get are books that I don't have access to for whatever reason um I'm hoping to pick up some of the other books that I meant to read in October but didn't because I want to get them finished by the end of the year so the reason that I haven't read very many mysteries though is because I I haven't had good experience with mysteries in the past all the mysteries I've read in the past I've always been able to guess and you write about who did it and kind of why sometimes and so I felt like mysteries tended to be very dull and not exciting because if you guess it and you're right for over half the book but you still have half of the book to go it's just not as fun or exciting so I'm trying to give mysteries a new try and hopefully I will be able to find some mysteries where I can't call it because if I can that's such a bummer if I can't then that's super exciting so I feel like with history that genre is such a hit or miss for every single independent book and I just I don't like that I don't like knowing if the book I'm gonna pick up is either a hit or a miss until I've already read like like you know what I mean I don't want to pick up a book and be super excited about it and then know what's gonna happen for a huge chunk of the book like that's just not very exciting to me and so I've always steered away from mystery because I'm too afraid that the books are going to be misses or duds and that I'm gonna know them so that's why I haven't read a lot of mystery hopefully some of these classic books will change my mind and if you guys leave me any mystery recommendations below hopefully those can also change my mind so yeah like I said comment down below if you have any mysteries or what you read in October or maybe what you didn't get knocked over I didn't get to a lot of books so it might just be nice to finish those up at the end of November because I have a super exciting December TBR I am so excited for it but that'll be in another month from now I am trying to post a video every week so stay tuned for those subscribe so that you can get the notification of when I post otherwise feel free to like this video comment down below and yeah that's pretty much it so until I see you guys in next week's video I wish you a happy meeting