before_class.md

Before class

A ten-minute checklist. Nothing here is clever; all of it has gone wrong for somebody.

The evening before

• make — figures regenerate, any edited deck rebuilds, the index refreshes.
• make check — no deck should be flagged review. If one is, a slide overruns its frame and the bottom line may be cut off in the room.
• Open this session's runsheet and pick your cut list now, not at minute 140. (The runsheets are not published — they are git-ignored assessment material, so a fresh clone will not have the folder; request them from the author.)
• Decide which exercises run live. The decks carry more than fits; the runsheet names the two or three worth the room's time.
• Note where the deck's appendix starts (the runsheet says, and slide_index.md marks it). It is outside the timed plan — stop there, and only go past it if you are ahead or the room asks for the derivation.

The morning of

• Open the deck PDF in a real PDF reader, full screen — not a browser tab. Check the navigation bar at the top renders.
• Open the companion notebook and run it once, top to bottom. A stale kernel in front of sixty people is a long two minutes.
• Have the data loaded: the notebooks resolve ISLP → bundled CSVs → the book's site, but only the first two work without wifi.
• Second screen: notebook on one, slides on the other. If you only have one, decide in advance where you switch and put the cyan Companion notebook boxes on your cut list of moments to pause.
• Print or share the handout if you use one: Teaching_Guide/handouts/chapter_NN_handout.pdf. Not published — it is build output, so run make handouts once to create the folder.

In the room

• Say at the start where the break falls. People settle when they know.
• The coloured boxes are a contract with the students — green is the thing to remember, red is the mistake everyone makes. Say so once, in Lecture 1, and they will read the decks correctly all semester.
• When an exercise goes up: give the time, say it out loud, and stop talking. The solution slide is always the next one, so you can move on cleanly when the time is up.

If technology fails

• Every deck is self-contained in its PDF: no internet needed.
• Every notebook has a Colab badge — if a local environment breaks, students can run it in a browser with a Google account.
• The mock exams and their solutions are not in the repository. If you want them in the room, bring them yourself.

After the session

• Note anything that ran long or fell flat directly in that session's runsheet — it is a plain Markdown file, and next year's you will be grateful.