Re: STUDENTS GO AWAY!!!!!!!??????

[mrbunny@mail.zynet.co.uk]

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Thank you all very much for your responses, particularly to Mr Dewar 
who has also taken the time for a few "off air" discussions.

Unfortunately many assumptions have been made about students. Yes
there are some that would post in at the drop of a hat but a very
unfair assumption has been made that "all" students are lazy and
unresourceful. Saying "If all students....." condemns us all to the
bottom of the heap and does not remotely provide a true picture of the
range of personalities that exist within the maligned collective
"students"  In my experience of two university courses lazy students
are the minority. I believe that time constrained examinations (in my
case a 3 hour program modification task sitting at the terminal) are
still a crucial part of most technical courses, and therefore students
are well aware that they must develop a proper "learning process" to
fully understand their subject.  Contrary to the the implications
being made that "all" students are lazy and unresourceful, in todays
economic climate many students work very hard to cope with both
financial and academic pressures.
My "negative" response to being told not to post to the group arose
from the sweeping assumption (yes another one!) that my simple
question was evidence of my unresourcefulness and lack of
understanding of the learning process. I had in fact looked through my
course notes, through text books, and through sample programs and not
found what I was looking for. The simple reason being that what I was
looking for did not exist A single command for deleting one record
from an array. I now understand that the method is to move all records
above that to be deleted down one level, an idea I was toying
with. But with the manipulation of arrays being so commonplace I could
not believe that there was not a simple command I had overlooked to
perform this. 
Also if you consider yourself to be an intelligent resourceful person
it hurts to be told you cant talk to someone because you are not an
intelligent resourceful person. I am now 39 years old. I left school
with only low level qualifications but despite that I rose to director
level of a recruitment company turning over �3 million p.a. I own two
houses, and the mortgage is paid on one of them. (The recession and
stress led me into computing) So to be labelled as someone lacking in
resourcefulness and having no understanding of the learning process is
dissappointing, to say the least.
More than 25% of the UK student population are over 25yrs old. They
are usually like myself, looking for a career change, often they are
single parents raising children as well as studying. These are very
resourceful people. 
So you see, this concept that students are so unresourceful that given
half a chance they will "all" post into the newsgroup for each and
every assignment question is ridiculous! We are being discouraged from
the group as a result of a fears based on little hard evidence. Fears
based on assumptions.

Mark