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+# VG151 — Lab 1
+
+2022-09-21
+
+Last night I held my very first real lab this semester, lab 1.
+
+The single worst thing is, it had to be online. Fall semester last year
+was offline, but this one only lasted four hours before campus imposed
+a lockdown and forced us online. I cannot overstate how disruptive this
+is. I was about to speak shit of some people but my lawyer advised me not
+to.
+
+## Gather All Students Challenge (Impossible)
+
+Before the lab I needed to ensure everyone was on our self-hosted Gitea
+and Mattermost in the department server. They were not. It simply was not
+possible to get everyone to follow steps as simple as clicking an invite
+link, even if we four TAs together held three lab 0 sessions last week to
+help them sign up on each of them. We even sent a Canvas annoucement.
+Guess how many didn't listen?
+
+5 out of 83.
+
+Yeah, it's natural to forget things in the first days of university,
+especially in such turbulent times. But guess how many remain unreachable
+even after we sent them a personal email?
+
+2.
+
+_Well guess you don't care about this course then_
+
+As a result, at the beginning of the lab, several homework groups were
+lacking a member. There are supposed to be four. One even lacked two.
+
+## Attendance and Atmosphere
+
+Attendance was not great. I expected 27 students; 15 showed up on time. At
+the peak there were about 20.
+
+I tried using sketches and puns to cheer up the atmosphere, but you can't
+really expect anything online. I was virtually talking into a vacuum, but
+I don't mind. I am not paid enough to.
+
+## Git, Gitea, and Getting everyone confused
+
+Online labs are just _amazing_. Nothing feels better than helping
+a clueless student to figure out what an error message means. Via Zoom. In
+the chatbox. Where a message takes a dozen seconds to write and another
+dozen to read. Just _fantastic_.
+
+I asked every attendee to set up their git repos and follow a tutorial
+that past TAs wrote. It's about submitting a hypothetical homework, h0.
+I spent half an hour demonstrating, then gave them another half hour to
+follow it. The git part involves:
+
+- `git clone`
+- `git checkout`
+- `git add`
+- `git commit`
+- `git push`
+
+And gitea:
+
+- Opening PRs
+- Assigning teammates
+- Reviewing PRs
+- Merging PRs
+- Releasing
+
+Rudimentary, yes, but most of who I'm talking to were completely fresh to
+git. So many students had zero idea what I was doing, let alone what they
+should do.
+
+![Zoom chatbox. An attendee says "Ummmm.....I don't understand what we are
+doing from the beginning to now..." and five more say "+1"](img/vg151_lab1/lab1_dont_understand.png)
+
+Unfortunately this was the best I could do, so all I could say is, you
+gotta follow the tutorial I sent you.
+
+Fresh students often struggle to understand how placeholders work. For
+example, one student asked me why they got an error on this step:
+
+```
+git checkout -b <your_student_id>
+```
+
+I checked and sure enough, they thought these angle brackets were literal
+ones. Fortunately this sort of misunderstanding usually happens only once.
+
+Update: another student did the same on the Wednesday section.
+
+While each group was trying out git and gitea on their own, I closely
+inspected all their repos on gitea. A common, obvious mistake is that
+some of them were using arbitrary strings as branch names, whereas it says
+"your student id" in the tutorial. This was my fault; I used alice and bob
+in my demonstration for "simplicity", but quite the contrary, it misled
+students.
+
+I was in charge of 7 groups. At the end, two were very close from
+completing everything; others had varying levels of success. Many
+individuals hardly did anything at all. (They _might_ be doing things
+locally, but come on.)
+
+## Rule 0 of online labs: no one will speak
+
+Absolutely no one unmuted their microphone. I believe I was the only one
+that ever spoke. Kinda expected that, huh?
+
+Anyway, I survived an awkward interaction via chatbox, and ended the lab
+leaving most attendees still confused.
+
+I also made a mistake when explaing the difference between `A'` and `A.'`
+in matlab. I thought they both transpose `A` because I am an inferior
+being constrained to the real number line, unaware of the complex plane.
+Apparently `A'` is the complex conjugate and `A.'` is the real
+transposition.
+
+## Acknowledgement
+
+At the end of the lab I got this one PM though:
+
+![Zoom chatbox. A student PMs me "Really helpful.Thanks for the RC"](img/vg151_lab1/lab1_rc.png)
+
+Technically this isn't an RC, but I'll take it. Thanks!
+
+I would like to thank Manuel, Mack, Menako, King and Fly for their support
+in my first lab. I would also like to thank
+[Boming](https://boyanzh.site/) for Joint-Teapot, an automation tool that
+helped me with chores that would otherwise have to be done manually 21
+times.
+
+## Conclusion
+
+Lessons learned:
+
+- If students will use a document, keep it on the side of my screen while
+  I demonstrate anything and constantly remind them of where I am
+- If I need to demonstrate a gigantic heap of steps, I'd better partition
+  them into ingestible chunks
+- I should probably go harder on the students and force some of them to
+  show their work
+- Do not simplify things too far