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Re: An Open Message From An Instructor

From: Joel Garry <joel-garry_at_nospam.cox.net>
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 06:49:02 GMT
Message-ID: <slrnaj7go4.hm.joel-garry@zr1.vista1.sdca.cox.net>


On Mon, 01 Jul 2002 15:53:25 GMT, Daniel Morgan <dmorgan_at_exesolutions.com> wrote:
>As an instructor teaching Oracle at the University of Washington I
>appreciate the fact that so many of you are willing to try to help those
>that are obviously students.
>
>But I would ask that you consider that you are not doing these people as
>much of a favor giving them the complete answer as you would be if you
>gave them hints leading them in the right direction.

Rather than hints, why not an explicit answer of where the answer can be found?

We are not your teaching assistants. We just want to help. I have had so many people thank me profusely for saying "look under such and such in such and such manual/book" rather than "RTFM" (which FM may be huge or not known to all or not immediately obvious as pertinent to the question). Trying to "teach someone how to think like a programmer" with improperly contextualized hints may not even be doing them a favor, it can be bad teaching. Giving examples of how to look things up may be good towards real world expertise.

In case you haven't taken the hint, some of us have been burned by this hint thingee.

>
>I can tell you for a fact that if I ever find one of my students asking
>questions here and responding with the answer provided by someone
>posting a response I will give no credit. And I am sure other
>instructors are here too and will do the same.

And yet in the real world, I often find the answers here as part of the job. Sometimes even my own answers posted years before, that I had completely forgotten about.

But I do remember the teacher who said he wouldn't mark me down if I showed him that the Stratus compiler I was using for homework didn't have a particular feature of the IBM one he was using to make up the assignment, then marked me down anyways. 20 years ago.

jg

-- 
These opinions are my own. 
http://www.garry.to                                       Oracle and unix guy.
mailto:joel-garry_at_nospam.cox.net                       Remove nospam to reply. 
Received on Tue Jul 16 2002 - 01:49:02 CDT

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