teacherhelper 0.0.5

Useful abstractions and CLI to make teaching more scriptable.

Overview

This is a library of stuff that I have, used to automate my work as a teacher. For the most part, it's been the primary means for me learning object oriented programming, and has had a history of massive revision as I continue to learn and fix my mistakes. Most recently, in late summer 2021, I deleted most of the project except the parts I actually use, and I plan to continue adding to it throughout this school year; hopefully adding some things that are actually useful!

Installation

You can install this package via pip:

pip install teacherhelper

Usage

Once installed, the th command provides the following CLI utilities:

Supported commands:

--student -s [name]
    Prints the student according to Student.__str__(). Provides basic
    student and guardian information.

--parent -p [parent/guardian name]
    Prints the student just like in student search, but search by
    parent instead of by student. Search algorithm prioritizes primary
    contacts; so a fuzzy string match with a primary contact at a
    lower confidence will be returned over a better match against a
    secondary contact.

--new
    Will refresh the cache by loading in spreadsheets at
    `./data/students.csv` and `./data/parents.csv`.

[no arguments]
    Run this script with no arguments, and it will enter the shell mode.
    Here, the helper object is instantiated in the local namespace with
    the variable name "helper".

Initial Setup

The module will work with data in one directory of your machine. You should define the path to this directory as an environment variable: HELPER_DATA.

In that folder, you should put two csv files that contain the data you want to populate the module with: students.csv and parents.csv.

students.csv should contain the following exact columns:

• first name
• last name
• grade level
• homeroom teacher
• email address 1
• birth date

guardians.csv should contain the following exact columns:

• guardian first name
• guardian last name
• student first name
• student last name
• primary contact
• guardian email address 1
• guardian mobile phone
• guardian phone
• guardian work phone
• comments
• allow contact
• student resides with
• relation to student

Helper Class Methods

find_nearest_match(self, student_name) -> Student | None

Lookup a student.

find_parent(self, parent_name) -> Student | None

Lookup a student by parent name.

exhaustive_search(self, name, subgroup: list[Student], threshold: int)

Search for a student within a subgroup. This helps for dealing with data that is gnarly, misspelled, or incomplete. If you know that you are processing data from some subgroup of students like a single homeroom, you can add that as a search parameter and also lower the confidence threshold, making it possible to get more matches:

name = 'Tomme'  # Tommy needs a typing lesson
subgroup = helper.homerooms['Smith']
tommy_object = helper.exhaustive_search(name, subgroup, threshold=50)