From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,1d2825e3bbbe82fb X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) Subject: Re: Need help bad!!!!! Date: 1996/10/27 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 192495370 references: <54u8m2$ko1@news.cdsnet.net> <01bbc402$6c7b01c0$088371a5@dhoossr.iquest.com> organization: New York University newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 1996-10-27T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: David Hoos says "It would really be nice if we could get people to read the LRM before posting questions, but, alas, I find in my work in industry that even people who have been programming for years are too lazy to look it up if there's someone nearby handy to ask." Two responses, first, why should they bother, if you are willing to answer their questions in such detail for them. This teaches laziness. Please be careful about helping students TOO much, see my previous post on this subject. You are NOT doing them a favor by spoon-feeding them. They need precisely to learn how to read and solve their own problems. Second, the RM is not at all the right source to point people to. Instead they need to be reading a good text book. Much of the RM is inpenetrable even to most of the experts, unless you already understand 95% of what you need already. It *is* good for filling in the remaining subtle 5% Also, to be fair, Annex A is more accessiible than much of the rest, but still sending a student with this level of misunderstanding to the RM is not helpful! Students tend often to the path of least resistance in doing assignments. They write down some approximate junk without making any effort to find out how to do things (trying to use Text_IO as though it is identical semantically to C getchar is an example), and then get people to help them fix it. Let's be helpful to students, but not TOO helpful :-)