So I'm meditating on pedagogy again, having signed up for quite a few hours of presentation time, regarding Python etc. I've got a PSU class (high schoolers my target audience), and a volunteer gig with PPS, teaching math/CS to 8th graders (under a union member's supervision). For a long time, I've felt some frustration with published CS teaching texts because they don't put much textured information into their example data structures, by which I mean, I've never seen the Roman emperors, in chrono order, or the succession of rock bands played in by drummer X or guitarist Y. Not much about the history of trains, pre or post diesel. Or lets compile some data on Barbie's boy friends (just Ken?) -- or Buffy's (most of them vampires). Here's an opportunity to impart the humanities entirely tangentially to the engineering curriculum. As drivers of a new math/CS hybrid, I think we now realize that such opportunities for orthogonality should be prized, not sneezed at. Retaining student attention and interest, a precious commodity, is a worthy goal, and if a percentage of your student gain most from gazing absently at your wall posters, then at least make sure you've got some interesting wall posters (like, have you considered plasma?). Pile on opportunities for your lurker/auditors to jump to a higher bandwidth, even at the risk of pointing to content beyond your own specific scope (e.g. I'm no pro astronomer, but I'm happy and eager to share the experience with my students). So like here's what I mean (somewhat decayed fragment, imagine found in some archeological dig): moons = { 'Jupiter': ['Metis','Adrastea','Amalthea','Thebe', 'Leda','Ananke','Himalia','Carme', 'Lysithea','Pasiphae','Elara','Sinope', 'Io','Europa','Ganymede','Callisto'], 'Saturn': ['Pan','Atlas','Prometheus','Pandora', 'Epimetheus','Janus','Mimas','Enceladus', 'Tethys','Telesto','Calypso','Dione', 'Helene','Rhea','Titan','Hyperion', 'Iapetus','Phoebe'], 'Uranus': ['Cordelia','Ophelia','Bianca','Cressida', 'Desdemonia','Juliet','Portia','Rosalind', 'Belinda','Puck' There're a few goals here, not just to impress ourselves with the number of moons Jupiter's got, or Saturn. And pretty cool how much Shakespeare got mapped, at least in this particular namespace. We also want to demonstrate nesting, and here in this example I've not yet gone very deep: string-indexed lists of strings, basically. But of course we could go with things like lists of tuples of dictionaries of tuples of named functions (one could write some algorithm to randomly deepen nesting, always/only per the grammar of the language, e.g. per Python in this case). The push here is towards ultra-fluency when first learning the language, and then it's OK when adult-minded rust sets in, and one's data structures retreat to sane depths. That comes later, in the workaday world, when we've got weekend plans and want to get home and don't necessarily have time to appreciate some geek's damnably clever code. We acknowledge extreme fluency as a phase in the training, yet we don't insist these standards be met in the average workaday world. On the contrary, we insist on more a mellow programming style -- and that's both reasonable and right. Overly clever code is simply overly taxing to decipher and debug. Yet sometimes we need it and use it. We like our clowns to stay clever over time, true, however not every Python programmer should come to work wearing big shoes and a red nose. At least, not all at the same time. Vary your diet -- the usual middle way type teaching, as relevant in CS as in everyday living. Kirby