Re: Thank you!

[dewar@schonberg.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

A general comment on helping people with homework assignments or other
simple problems. I think it is important that we think a little about
what the policy of comp.lang.ada should be in this regard. I am talking
here about an informal community policy, not one that anyone enforces in
any sense.

Ada is taught in quite a lot of schools (a recent survey showed it to
be nearly a third of the schools if you exclude Pascal). This is certainly
not an overwhelming presence, but neither is it a trivial presence, and what
it means is that we have many thousands of students learning Ada.

Typical students have an assignment every two or three weeks, and if we
establish that CLA is a good place to get answers to your questions, then
I would guess, from my experience teaching and soliciting such questions,
that each student might post two messages per assignment. This can easily
add up to thousands of posts a week.

If people answer such questions by posting followups rather than email,
a common habit, this number can easily be multiplied by 3 or 4.

Well that's a volume to start worrying about.

As a teacher, I would prefer that students make more effort to figure things
out on their own, and then if they can't, bring me or my teaching assistant
the problem in any case. I tell my students NOT to post to CLA, and that
I will notice if they do :-) [DejaNews has been the downfall of quite a few
students in the past :-)]

I don't really want to start a long thread on this issue, since that would
be even more noise on the group, but it would be helpful if everyone would
think twice before answering questions that are obviously from students 
working on assignments. If you feel you should answer, don't just do their
work for them, if you do, you are doing them a disservice, not helping.
Instead try to point out how THEY can find their own mistake. Also, reply
to them by email, NOT by posting. Nearly all newsgroup readers can easily
reply with email instead of followups, but sometimes you get the impression
that some people have never found this capability.

My thoughts here only apply to beginning students learning Ada for the
first time and asking very elementary questions. Of course, especially
for those with little experience in teaching, it can be hard to tell
these cases sometimes (you can't count on an edu address, since many
students post from other accounts). I guess it is because I have been
teaching for a long time, but I have a pretty good idea when this happens,
and I have seen a number of occasions on the group where students have had
an assignment to do, and someone has completely done the assignment for
them, thinking they are being helpful.

So, if everyone can think about this a little before they post replies, it
will (a) help to keep traffic down on the group and (b) end up helping the
students more -- programming is something you learn by doing, not by having
someone else do for you :-)