This sort of thing — grouping incoming students based on prior ability — is fairly common in introductory foreign-language courses. If you don't do this, it's e

This sort of thing — grouping incoming students based on prior ability — is fairly common in introductory foreign-language courses. If you don't do this, it's extraordinarily difficult to teach at a pace that isn't generally too fast for the newbies and isn't generally too slow for the people who have done this before. As someone who's suggested moderately overcomplicated solutions to introductory problems: that doesn't sound like social awkwardness to me. It sounds like people trying to be helpful who don't have any experience thinking about questions like "how can I help this other person solve this problem without introducing twelve entirely new concepts and four calls to an entirely new API?"