Lesson 10

Why This Class Runs This Way

Daily Rhythm, Sprint Rhythm, and Sprint Calendar tell you what happens. This one tells you why, including the places where I am not sure yet and the places where previous versions of this class failed.

I am publishing this because a rule that only works when you do not know the reason is a bad rule. If something here does not survive you reading it, it was going to break by April anyway, and I would rather find out in August.

The thing that has killed every system I have tried

Exit tickets. Personal todo lists. Weekly status threads. Comment threads on assignments. All of these worked for about three weeks and then died.

They did not die because they were bad ideas. They died because every one of them depended on me noticing that you had not done it and then chasing you about it. Twenty students times one small thing per week is a hundred small acts of chasing per month, and I cannot sustain that. So it decays, and once a system decays visibly, the students who were doing it stop, because why would you keep doing something that clearly does not matter.

So this year everything is built on one principle: I will not chase you.

Not because I do not care. Because chasing feels like caring and it is actually the thing that guarantees the system collapses, which does not help you at all.

What that means in practice:

If you do not submit a status report, nothing gets printed and your folder has a gap in it. I will not email you about it.
If you do not book a 1-on-1, you do not have one, and your grade reflects that. I will not remind you the day before.
If you miss the BOM deadline, the part does not arrive. I will not put in a rush order.
If you do not come clear a card, it stays uncleared.

Every one of those is visible to you before it becomes a problem. None of them are surprises. That is the trade: you get a system that will still be running in April, and in exchange the tracking is yours.

Why the deadlines do not move

The BOM deadline is the clearest case, so let me be direct about it.

School purchasing genuinely takes weeks. That is not me being strict, it is a district process I do not control. So the one-sprint-ahead rule is not a rule I invented to teach you a lesson. It is roughly how long ordering actually takes, written down.

Here is the part worth saying out loud: I am going to hold that deadline the first time one of my best students misses it. Not because I want to, and not because the work you were doing instead was unimportant. Because an exception in September means there is no deadline in April, and April is when it matters. If I bend it for the person who deserves it most, I have to bend it for everyone, and then we are back to me tracking purchase requests in my head at 11pm.

Same logic on cleanup, on the 3:30 bench rule, on the 1-on-1 window. These are load-bearing.

Why cards are demonstrated, not turned in

You can ask an AI to write you a lab report. You cannot ask it for the number you measured on the bench, or to modify your own code while I watch, or to hand me the part you made.

That is the whole reason cards clear by demonstration. It is not distrust. It is that a written artifact no longer proves what it used to prove, and I would rather build verification that still works than pretend nothing changed. This is also true outside of school now, and it will be true in whatever you do next.

Practical consequence: for a lot of cards I will ask you to change something on the spot. Not to catch you out. Because being able to change a thing is the difference between understanding it and having read about it, and that difference is what I am actually assessing.

The arithmetic that does not quite work

Sprint Rhythm says three cards per sprint fit in the 3:00 to 3:30 seated block. Let me show you the actual math, because it is close but it does not close.

Three cards at 45 to 60 minutes each is 135 to 180 minutes per sprint.

The seated block is 30 minutes times six sessions, which is 180 minutes. That looks fine until you subtract punch-in and standup, which is about thirteen minutes. Real seated time is more like 17 minutes per session, or about 100 minutes per sprint.

So the card load exceeds the seated block by roughly a third.

Three ways to fix that, and I have not picked one:

Move standup to 3:00 and eat during it. Buys back ten minutes, loses the clean transition that punching in and sitting down gives us.
Accept that about a third of card work is homework or happens during the build block.
Drop the quota to two cards per sprint and take longer to get through the library.

I am telling you this instead of quietly hoping you do not notice, for two reasons. One, you would notice. Two, this is what engineering estimation actually looks like: you do the arithmetic, it does not close, and you choose which constraint to relax on purpose rather than discovering the problem in week four.

We will settle it by early October, and if you have an opinion I want it at a retro.

Why we start with folders and not binders

A folder costs a dollar and requires nothing of you. A binder with dividers is a system, and systems that arrive before you need them get abandoned.

So here is the plan, stated plainly rather than sprung on you: we start with folders, and sometime around January the folders will stop working. Pages will fall out. Somebody will not be able to find their DDR from Sprint 2. When that happens, tell me and we will get binders and dividers.

I could hand you a binder in August. But then you would have a binder and no idea why the dividers are where they are. In January you will know exactly why, because you will have just spent twenty minutes looking for a piece of paper.

Why the food rule is a time and not a judgment

Food off the benches at 3:30, and I am not going to argue about whether your specific snack is fine.

Two real reasons. Electronics benches and pool gear are the two places in this room where a spill costs money and creates a hazard, and that is a genuine safety line, not a preference. And a fixed window beats me making twenty individual judgment calls about grazing over the course of a two hour block.

When Card 5.1 runs, you write the JSA for this room, and that line goes in it in your words. At that point it stops being my rule.

What I am watching for

Not a secret, so you might as well know.

Blockers that show up for the first time at a 1-on-1. If a problem existed on day three and I hear about it on day eighteen, that is not a problem with the problem, that is a problem with the standup. When I see it, I will spend the next couple of sessions in that team’s corner.

Three cards cleared and nothing built. It is technically possible to hit the card quota, write clean status reports, and never touch the vehicle. The card system by itself would not catch that. Your hours log and your team’s sprint commitment do. Cards are the floor, not the job.

Status reports that describe activity instead of results. “Worked on the claw” for three sprints in a row is a real thing that happens and it is what the goals section exists to prevent.

The parts that depend on people who are not me

Water access is not confirmed for all twelve sprints. The Sprint Calendar lists a water day for every sprint, but each one is subject to pool access, on purpose. Pool scheduling involves a facility I do not control, and I would rather hedge in August and exceed it than promise twelve water days and cancel four.

If a water day falls through, the sprint still ends with a demonstration: assembled, powered, tethered, running dry on the bench. A sprint that ends with nothing demonstrated is a sprint whose deadline was fiction, and we are not doing that.

Week 3 Thursday, and what you should be doing

While I am running 1-on-1s, I am effectively unavailable for two hours. Twenty people at five minutes each fills the block.

That means Week 3 Thursday is a self-directed session, and it is not a good day for anything that wants me watching. No soldering, no first-time tool use, no fabrication you have not done before.

It is a good day for: notebook catch-up, reading for the next unit, documentation, seated card work, writing DDRs, getting your status report and folder in order. Come in with a plan for it. If you show up to Week 3 Thursday with nothing to do, you will have wasted the two hours and I will not have noticed in time to help.

If something here is wrong

Bring it to a retro. That is what the retro is for, and “this part of the system is not working” is exactly the kind of thing it is supposed to surface.

I have taught this class before without most of this structure and it did not go as well as it should have. That was my fault, not the previous students’. This is my attempt to fix it, and some of it will be wrong.