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

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

Matthew said

<<I came in late on this one, Robert, but it seems to me you don't want
students posting in this Newsgroup.  IMHO, this isn't the correct
attitude.  the Newsgroup should be open to those who have questions about
things they don't understand.  I mean, that's the point, right?  Help
folks solve problems?

Student or professional, a problem is a problem.  And, although I'm sure
that nobody here would do their homework for them, problems for students
can be particularly vexing.  Especially when it's their first language.>>

On the contrary, I welcome students questions -- *if* they do their
homework before asking -- in particular, as with all newsgroups, the
first place to send students off to is the FAQ -- especially since ours
(the home page at www.adahome.com) is so well done. The online tutorials
are often tremendously helpful too -- I advise all my students to try
running these.

<<Student or professional, a problem is a problem>>

No, that's not quite true. And that's precisely the disctinction that I
try to emphasize to people. If a profession posts a question saying
"I need to glub a zork", then we help him or her figure out how to
glub a zork, since that is the issue.

But it a student says "I need to glub a zork [for an assignment]", the
point of the assignment is not to glub a zork, it is for the student to
FIGURE OUT HOW to glub a zork. It is this process of figuring out for
yourself that is absolutely crucial to the learning process when it comes
to programming.

One of the things that is hard to learn if you teach programming (I have
been learning this for 30 years), is that when a student asks a question
about their program -- the *easy* thing to do, is just to answer the
question -- but if you do that, then you can easily short circuit the
assignment. A very common phenomenon, that was around long before the
net and newsgroups, since the same thing happens when you ask e.g.
teaching assistants, is that students manage to turn in homework assignments
that work without ever having learned the foggiest idea about how programs
work. They do this by writing some gross approximation, and then asking
lots of questions. People give them helpful hints ("you should initialize
this variable, you should do the multiplicatoin first ... etc") and they
manage to get the program working by assembling this advice.

This certainly is not cheating, but it does short change the students,
and the trouble with the newsgroups and the net is that now this effect
can be greatly multiplied. I often see people trying to be helpful to
students, but they don't have the experience to do it the "right" way.

That's because they don't understand the distinction ("a problem is a 
problem") between problem solving in a professional environment and
students learning.

So I would encourage everyone who wants to help students to be careful
to bear this distinction in mind, and try to help them sove the real
problem, which is learning how to figure out the solution for
themselves, rather than solving the problem directly.

By the way, I communicate with many students who post to CLA, and most
often, these dialogs are very constructive, and students appreciate being
pointed in helpful directions (books, tutorials, the home page etc).
Occasionally, someone, like mrbunny, reacts very negatively, but perhaps
even in that case, eventually he will go off to www.adahome.com, run
the online tutorials etc, and find that useful!

I quite understand that students can get frustrated. When a student comes
to me with a program that does not work, and I refuse to fix it from them,
they are often angry, and I quite see how, if you like to be helpful, it
is very tempting to fix the problem for them, and the student goes away
feeling you have been terribly helpful, and they are thankful for it, but
you have not really helped them in such a situation.

So, always think about how to help people learn, not about how to help
people get their program working -- the two are not quite the same.

Robert Dewar