It’s the middle of a 5-day workweek. Well, for me it is. For my students, today was Friday. They have a 4-day weekend because of a district-wide professional development day on Friday and Columbus Day (aka Indigenous Peoples’ Day) on Monday. Students were a little wild this week, especially with Valentine’s Day festivities, which added to the chaos in my schedule by shifting the life part of work-life balance to a little extra weekday life. The workload will not lighten to accommodate my priorities, so there will be a little extra work on Sunday and Monday. Thankfully, Monday is still part of this week’s recovery time. Though it’s only a 3-day weekend for us teachers, the timing of it works out well for me – Case Western Reserve University’s hackathon runs Friday night through Sunday afternoon. More on that next week. For now, I bring it up to allay my anxiety that these posts are too brief. My work/life schedule is PACKED right now, so quick scavenger hunt tasks are welcome breaks to the plan/grade/brainstorm/code cycle of most every other waking moment.
The content of Day 3 was sorting and basic date/time functions on a US Traffic Fatality dataset from 2015-2016. On previous days, I’d started kernels directly from the datasets and coded the activities more or less from scratch. Today, I chose to fork the tutorial kernel to play around with that format. My Kaggle Kernel on the task looks a little wonky because I left in all of the original markdown boxes, which included a few essential lines of my code (such as libraries I’d imported) scattered throughout. I’m not entirely sold on the notebook-type kernels, but that’s mostly based on my preference for seeing code condensed on the left with minimal padding and the console placed below or to the right. Old habits die hard. I’m going to stick with the notebooks for a while and get myself to a place where I’m beyond comfortable working in them.
