4 ms·

Any teaching, training, has to hook with the experience of students. Otherwise, it will lead to cramming, etc; that's what we see in grade-driven teaching. You

Any teaching, training, has to hook with the experience of students. Otherwise, it will lead to cramming, etc; that's what we see in grade-driven teaching. You are doing a great service by using the client data to solve "mini-problems" of your students.

WalterBright 5y ago
> grade-driven teaching I've never understood the modern theory that one can master a subject yet not be able to answer questions about it.
- majormajor 5y ago
  I think you've got that backward. I think parent poster is complaining about teaching methods where the belief is that "answering questions" -> "mastery." "Grade-driven teaching" here refers more to the "all we're gonna do is give you homework and a test." It's like industrialization of teaching - no mentoring or individual conversation, just tests and reading material. When you've got 1 teacher and 20-40 kids, it's about all you can do. Lots of passing of tests from short-term memorization that's then promptly forgotten.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I've forgotten the material from many courses I've taken. But I've also discovered that the knowledge quickly returns if I retake a course on the same material, far quicker than it took the first time. The knowledge is still there, it just needs some WD-40 to break it loose again. And yes, doing column buckling problem sets in college enabled me to size the jackscrew for the 757, as it was a column buckling problem.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      I don't know anything about column buckling, but if you'd cranked out a bunch of column buckling problem sets and not paid any attention to when/where it would be applicable, would it still have helped you later? If you had forgotten the exact technique, would you have been able to check a reference book anyway? Do you think memorizing names and dates of people and events from World War I gives much mastery of history? Or would memorizing the names of standard library functions and the academic definition of `pointer` and `recursion` give you much mastery of C? (The flip side of this is folks I've worked with who will immediately say "this is the Command Pattern" or such and jump to writing a bunch of code that either is massive overkill and/or just breaks down when the real world introduces some edge cases.)
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        I knew how the column buckling equations were derived, therefore I knew when they were applicable and when they weren't. As for checking a reference, I knew that "column buckling" was a thing. Before I studied it, I didn't know the concept even existed, and would have no idea how to look up something I didn't even know existed or what it might be called. > Do you think memorizing names and dates of people and events from World War I gives much mastery of history? How are you going to understand WW1 without knowing who Ludendorff was? I know that if you don't know names and dates and events, you cannot have a mastery of history. You don't have any framework to hang analysis or understanding on. > Or would memorizing the names of standard library functions Nobody does that. But I will say that if you can't name any of them, I guarantee you don't know squat about C. > and the academic definition of `pointer` and `recursion` give you much mastery of C? I wonder how many C experts you know can't answer a question about what a pointer is.
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    What’s interesting to me is that I’m tue internet you’ve got loads of students and loads of more experienced medium people meeting on stackoverflow and forums and right there where there is individual connection and back and forth, the experts keep trying to silence it because they want only expert discussions about advanced topics. Like the companies that will help you leave as a customer because at least you leave with a good feeling and might come back, versus the companies which make it hard so you hate them forever. Experts go round Internet forums with a “fuck off lazy noob” attitude then wonder why the forum is in decline and empty with only noobs traffic, and then blame it on the noobs, because they are overrunning the site and that must be driving the “good people” out. Mentoring and individual communication happens all over, but it looks like “doing their homework for them” which is verboten. If they don’t learn from your answers, you might, other readers might. The fix for “eternal September” is not “duplicate question” it’s that the older questions and answers need to be deleted, forgotten. The important bit is the development of ideas in the questioner and answerer, not the production of paperwork. I suspect there is room for a huge forum/site based around these ideas that would combine collaborative editing, live examples, questions, and push new people not on “how to ask a good question” but “how to engage in a back and forth discussion” in some way. This has been a disjointed blog post in a comment.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  /watches straw man fall over without putting up a fight. Would you rather work with someone who added a major subsystem to one of your compilers for fun or someone who had never coded but could recite the ISO standard by heart? Who believes the former person “would not be able to answer questions about [the subject]”? If measurements tend to become targets over time then the goal of “develop expertise” measured by “pass a test” shifts to a goal of “pass the test”, and the test is limited to what you can ask hundreds of students in a couple of hours, and they’ve seen practise papers and last year’s papers and you can’t talk to them, and you can’t see them work or the results of their work. Is that then a good way, to develop and validate their expertise? Is it the best available way?
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > Who believes the former person “would not be able to answer questions about [the subject]”? All the people who believe that "teaching the test" is not real knowledge. For example, would you hire a lawyer who flunked the bar? How about consult a physician who couldn't pass his medical boards? How about get on an airplane with a pilot who flunked flight school, but "really knows how to fly"? And yes, there are bad tests. But there are also good tests, and they work. Personally, I've never encountered a person who mastered a topic but couldn't get a good grade in it.
    - nexuist 5y ago
      Lawyers who lose cases, physicians who couldn't save their patients, and pilots who have been in plane crashes still get to work in their occupation after the fact. Experience rules over all. In your examples all those people never got to practice their craft. Lawyers can't practice law without a bar, physicians can't perform surgery without a medical license, etc. But software development isn't like that. What if there was a surgeon who has completed 10,000 successful surgeries but never went through med school? What if there was a lawyer who won major cases with no law degree? Or a commercial pilot who successfully flew for years on a fraudulent license and only stopped flying because he got caught? (That last one actually happened a few months ago). If you could choose, would't you pick the surgeon with a wildly successful track record over the recently graduated med school student who has never done a surgery outside of residency?
__mharrison__ 5y ago
Yep, a lot of mini-problems that are generally relevant. I also show "real-world" code for every concept. Then they can see how this is applied in the Standard Library or other popular Python libraries.

WalterBright 5y ago

> grade-driven teaching I've never understood the modern theory that one can master a subject yet not be able to answer questions about it.

majormajor 5y ago
I think you've got that backward. I think parent poster is complaining about teaching methods where the belief is that "answering questions" -> "mastery." "Grade-driven teaching" here refers more to the "all we're gonna do is give you homework and a test." It's like industrialization of teaching - no mentoring or individual conversation, just tests and reading material. When you've got 1 teacher and 20-40 kids, it's about all you can do. Lots of passing of tests from short-term memorization that's then promptly forgotten.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I've forgotten the material from many courses I've taken. But I've also discovered that the knowledge quickly returns if I retake a course on the same material, far quicker than it took the first time. The knowledge is still there, it just needs some WD-40 to break it loose again. And yes, doing column buckling problem sets in college enabled me to size the jackscrew for the 757, as it was a column buckling problem.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    I don't know anything about column buckling, but if you'd cranked out a bunch of column buckling problem sets and not paid any attention to when/where it would be applicable, would it still have helped you later? If you had forgotten the exact technique, would you have been able to check a reference book anyway? Do you think memorizing names and dates of people and events from World War I gives much mastery of history? Or would memorizing the names of standard library functions and the academic definition of `pointer` and `recursion` give you much mastery of C? (The flip side of this is folks I've worked with who will immediately say "this is the Command Pattern" or such and jump to writing a bunch of code that either is massive overkill and/or just breaks down when the real world introduces some edge cases.)
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      I knew how the column buckling equations were derived, therefore I knew when they were applicable and when they weren't. As for checking a reference, I knew that "column buckling" was a thing. Before I studied it, I didn't know the concept even existed, and would have no idea how to look up something I didn't even know existed or what it might be called. > Do you think memorizing names and dates of people and events from World War I gives much mastery of history? How are you going to understand WW1 without knowing who Ludendorff was? I know that if you don't know names and dates and events, you cannot have a mastery of history. You don't have any framework to hang analysis or understanding on. > Or would memorizing the names of standard library functions Nobody does that. But I will say that if you can't name any of them, I guarantee you don't know squat about C. > and the academic definition of `pointer` and `recursion` give you much mastery of C? I wonder how many C experts you know can't answer a question about what a pointer is.
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  What’s interesting to me is that I’m tue internet you’ve got loads of students and loads of more experienced medium people meeting on stackoverflow and forums and right there where there is individual connection and back and forth, the experts keep trying to silence it because they want only expert discussions about advanced topics. Like the companies that will help you leave as a customer because at least you leave with a good feeling and might come back, versus the companies which make it hard so you hate them forever. Experts go round Internet forums with a “fuck off lazy noob” attitude then wonder why the forum is in decline and empty with only noobs traffic, and then blame it on the noobs, because they are overrunning the site and that must be driving the “good people” out. Mentoring and individual communication happens all over, but it looks like “doing their homework for them” which is verboten. If they don’t learn from your answers, you might, other readers might. The fix for “eternal September” is not “duplicate question” it’s that the older questions and answers need to be deleted, forgotten. The important bit is the development of ideas in the questioner and answerer, not the production of paperwork. I suspect there is room for a huge forum/site based around these ideas that would combine collaborative editing, live examples, questions, and push new people not on “how to ask a good question” but “how to engage in a back and forth discussion” in some way. This has been a disjointed blog post in a comment.
jodrellblank 5y ago
/watches straw man fall over without putting up a fight. Would you rather work with someone who added a major subsystem to one of your compilers for fun or someone who had never coded but could recite the ISO standard by heart? Who believes the former person “would not be able to answer questions about [the subject]”? If measurements tend to become targets over time then the goal of “develop expertise” measured by “pass a test” shifts to a goal of “pass the test”, and the test is limited to what you can ask hundreds of students in a couple of hours, and they’ve seen practise papers and last year’s papers and you can’t talk to them, and you can’t see them work or the results of their work. Is that then a good way, to develop and validate their expertise? Is it the best available way?
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > Who believes the former person “would not be able to answer questions about [the subject]”? All the people who believe that "teaching the test" is not real knowledge. For example, would you hire a lawyer who flunked the bar? How about consult a physician who couldn't pass his medical boards? How about get on an airplane with a pilot who flunked flight school, but "really knows how to fly"? And yes, there are bad tests. But there are also good tests, and they work. Personally, I've never encountered a person who mastered a topic but couldn't get a good grade in it.
  - nexuist 5y ago
    Lawyers who lose cases, physicians who couldn't save their patients, and pilots who have been in plane crashes still get to work in their occupation after the fact. Experience rules over all. In your examples all those people never got to practice their craft. Lawyers can't practice law without a bar, physicians can't perform surgery without a medical license, etc. But software development isn't like that. What if there was a surgeon who has completed 10,000 successful surgeries but never went through med school? What if there was a lawyer who won major cases with no law degree? Or a commercial pilot who successfully flew for years on a fraudulent license and only stopped flying because he got caught? (That last one actually happened a few months ago). If you could choose, would't you pick the surgeon with a wildly successful track record over the recently graduated med school student who has never done a surgery outside of residency?

__mharrison__ 5y ago

Yep, a lot of mini-problems that are generally relevant. I also show "real-world" code for every concept. Then they can see how this is applied in the Standard Library or other popular Python libraries.