Re: Helping Students

[mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman)]

In article <5bukg7$sgg@mtinsc01-mgt.ops.worldnet.att.net>,
FerretWoman <Ferretwoman@worldnet.att.net> wrote:

[snip]

>To all the students I say this...go see your teacher!  If you want to
>chat up here about the types of things you are learning that's fine,
>but when it comes to a problem, don't expect these people to solve it
>for you.  That's not learning...that could be considered cheating...

Whether it's cheating or not depends on the course rules, which ought
to be spelled out by the prof. 

More to the point, though - generally, we intro-course teachers try to
give projects that are within the grasp of our students. Generally,
we're not interested in seeing them fail, we're interested in seeing 
them succeed. Obviously I can't speak for John English, but in my own
course (intro-level, like his), I'm very much interested in having 
students ask _me_ (or my TA) for help. How do we calibrate the
difficulty of our exercises, how do we help to bail out students who
are in trouble, if they don't come to us?

So I say to my CLA friends: if a student asks for help, I can;t prevent
you from giving hints, but one of the hints ought to be something like
"have you taken advantage of the help offered by your prof and others 
associated with the course?"

Mike Feldman
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Michael B. Feldman -  chair, SIGAda Education Working Group
Professor, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
The George Washington University -  Washington, DC 20052 USA
202-994-5919 (voice) - 202-994-0227 (fax) 
http://www.seas.gwu.edu/faculty/mfeldman
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       Pork is all that money the government gives the other guys.
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