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

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

<<However, others have taken a strong anti-student-on-cla attitude
(maybe it was Mr. Dewar in another post, I don't know).  We need
to find a balance, and maybe we need to generate a new group for
questions and answers.>>

I certainly have no objections to a different group for beginnners
questions, an analogy is the use of teaching assistants and recitations
in conventional lectures. Still it wories me a bit, because I would
hate to see a situation where we get to feel that no questions are
appropriate on CLA. My feeling is that carefully asked questions,
where the student has done a bit of homework, and thought through
things, are valuable on CLA itself, and we see those all the time.

Few of the really knowledgable people on CLA are likely to spend time
reading a student group, so the danger is that there is a lack of
informed expertise in such a group, and you begin to get a lot of
false information. On CLA itself, we do occasionally get people trying
to be helpful and making entirely wrong statements, but they quickly
get corrected.

An analogy here again is in conventional lectures. I always welcome
questions in my lectures if I think they are useful (indeed sometimes
students criticize me for accepting too many questions, and not sticking
to the book :-) However, if someone asks a question that shows that they
clearly have not read the text book, that annoys other students, and it
is not appropriate to spend class time answering such questions.

So, speaking for myself, I think we should go out of our way to welcome
students who do their homework, and ask useful and well thought out
questions and not banish them to a backwater group. Students who have
not done their homework are better served by pointing them in the directions
where they can help themselves rather than sending them off to another
group.

Note that the issue is not about simplicity or complexity of questions,
sometimes, even are studying carefully, you cannot understand something
simple, but in that case your question should at least show that 
environment of attempted understanding. It is when people start deciding
that it is easier to ask newsgroup quesions than to study that I question
the apppropriateness, just as I would question the appropriateness of
someone deciding it is easier to ask questions in class than to read the
book.