I’d taught a programming class using Pascal one semester while in grad school so I felt well prepared to teach a workshop on the language to software developers

I’d taught a programming class using Pascal one semester while in grad school so I felt well prepared to teach a workshop on the language to software developers from across my company the following year. I was wrong. The students had differing levels of experience and different backgrounds, some COBOL programmers, some Fortran, some assembly language programmers. The company wanted to have the class taught over and over again to different groups, and I ended up teaching hundreds of programmers. What I realized was that it’s hard to anticipate everyone’s sticking points, and even when you think you know a subject, an unexpected question can be hard to answer clearly enough without boring some of the class. Even simple ideas like scope rules for Pascal required several iteration before I had good examples to explain and motivate the rules. The workshops were so much better after my tenth time through the material. It’s not surprising to me that good tutorials take a lot of work and iteration to develop.