Monday, June 26. 2006Be careful who you learn from
A quine is a program that prints its own source code (without any access to it). Typically quines are obscure code that few people can understand, and when run, they print the same obscure code that few people can understand. I've seen a similar trait in CS-education. If you show students really bad code, the weak students fail (pass by compensation:)) and the good students begin to write really bad obscure code. They are trying to imitate their teachers habits, and doing a lot of damage in the process. You really have to be careful who you learn from. 
Imitating your teacherWhen your teacher is a good practitioner who has been there and done that imitation is a good idea. Everyone has bad habits and everyone has good habits. It's up to the student to decide which ones to copy. For example, a very talented programmer I once knew taught me to always write conditionals in reverse order, for example...
The purpose of this is to make sure I was never bitten by the accidental assignment bug. This is a really good habit that I still have. Another habit I copied was to read pointer code aloud replacing a * with the words What is pointed to by and & with The address of. That really helped me get through messy pointer stuff. He also had an annoying habit of using implicit comparisons Who do you learn from?
This may seem very obvious, but there will come many times in life when you will seemingly have no other option. I was trained in as a hotel bellhop (aka luggage monkey) by an ignorant man who shouted at people if they parked their cars badly. He didn't get many tips and neither did I, until I learned from someone better. It's not always that easy to realise that your teacher is incompetent, but there are usually telltale signs. If they are uncomfortable/aggressive when dealing with questions, if they rely on "this is the way its done" style answers, if they can't explain the basics without resorting to universal bullshit answers...
I'm not just referring to lecture theatres here, you'll find this happens in many workplaces too. In general a good lecturer/instructor/manager who is teaching you something should be able to do so while answering all your questions. If they can't then they may not be the right person to learn from. Go along with it anyways for the sake of amicability, but keep an eye out for someone sharper to get a better education from. There is a tremendous quote from Paul Graham, that I'd like to finish on...
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"Go along with it anyways for the sake of amicability, but keep an eye out for someone sharper to get a better education from." So true!
 I like your post very much, and I completely agree that students, whether in academic or in professional seminars, should always (or at least a lot) question, in an appropriate and politely way, what the teacher says and thinks, especially if the subject is new to them. Teachers should also try to be humble and know that it is okay to say "I don't know the answer now, but I'll try to find it out for you", instead of inventing or making up some false assertions. Good luck with your career and congratulations on your Ph.D.
Hi Brian,
Thanks for reading, and for your comment. I must correct you however, I am still working my PhD, not finished yet unfortunately. Des
This is good advice seeing how im learning a programming language i will try to keep an eye out and ask lots of questions thanks
"universal bullshit answers"
I have got to disagree with you strenuously, here, Des Traynor. I'm a Senior Level High School Math teacher with a M.Sc. (also an unfinished Ph.D.) at a prominent North American private school. I have personally used the three "universal bullshit answers" on many occassions and not for any of the reasons you have cited. For example: 1) "I'd explain it to you but you wouldnt understand it" - used that once when a student asked me to prove the Jordan Curve Theorem (which I had stated as an example of an intuitively obvious Theorem which is actually hard to prove, like the Intermediate Value Theorem which we were learning). 2) "Did you not do this already? [in an earlier grade]" - used this on numerous occasions with students in Calculus who, despite me demonstarting numerous times, STILL CANT FACTOR quadratics whose leading coefficient are not 1. 3) "I don't have time to go through this " - have used this MANY times. Try teaching a full semester/year curriculum on a tight time schedule and then have some kid ask you how to find the equation of the tangent line to y=x^2 during a lecture on the substitution rule of integration, 4 days before the final exam. Of course, I always tell the student(s) they can see me later if they wish some further explanation. Maybe you use these excuses for the reasons stated but, in fact, there are good reasons why they are habitually used by people who are actually teachers. Nice try, though.
Pete...
1) A student asks you to prove the Jordan Curve Theorem, he is not asking you to explain something, he is asking you for a proof. You could explain to him why it is difficult to prove. You could explain to him *what knowledge he is missing*, that makes the theorem difficult. You could explain *where he could get this knowledge*. If you actually answered the words "I'd explain it to you, but YOU wouldn't understand", then you are letting the student down. 2) Again, If your answer to the question was "Did you not do this already" , then you're letting the student down. How much more difficult is it to say "This is grade 2 calculus. You need to brush up on that, have a look at chapter X of your book." I wasn't proposing that you start from scratch every time a student asks a question about a previously covered topic, I was proposing that you tell the student what notes to look at/study in order to get back up to speed. 3) This is probably the same answer/issue as 2). Basically if you cut a student off and tell him/her you don't have time, you are increasing his chances of failure. If you offer him a way to recover (i.e. start with chapter blah, let me know if you have problems there, if not try this section again) you are doing the best you can for him/her. I don't use these answers for the reasons stated Pete. I'd hardly go and write a blog post about it if I did. The fact that you seem to have taken such offence to the post to me implies I have struck a nerve. Your "Nice Try" sign off reeks of condescension by the way. None the less, thanks for reading Pete. I prefer people who disagree, it's a sign that something is being said
Nice post Des. Don't agree with it all but I do agree wit the general thrust. There are times when the "Universal Bulshit" answers are not bulshit answers but often times they are in reply to bulshit questions.
In a lecture course you can't go on every tangent students ask questions about, you can't re-do everything they should know from their last few years in college and there are some things that are not explainable to younger students. Granted, you should not use those answers to deal with simple and relevant quetions but they are still valid answers in many situations. The one answer that is never valid that I can see is "because that's how it's done". If you don't know why something is done in the way you teach it you should not be teaching it that way (or perhaps at all)!
Bart, thanks for your comment.
Using the phrase "bullshit question" is a little off putting, but I understand what you mean. When you're lecturing you are under many constraints, time is just one of them. Of course you can't go back over old ground just cause some student was out drinking through all of first year and only got the 40% required to pass, but you can say "This was covered by $lecturer in $module. I can't re-do it, so I advise you go back and check those lecture notes". But if all the class are saying "We don't understand it", you may as well go back and cover it, because to carry on regardless basically leaves you with a class who give up. -- After thought-- As you know, I prefer to deal in strong statements on this blog, rather than over qualified sentences of nothingless, so I see how you may read some stuff I write and think "That's a bit harsh", but bear in mind if you're not pissing someone off, you're doing something incredibly bland. Death by Risk Aversion is a good short article on this. http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/01/death_by_riskav.html
Actaully, I think we are on the same hymn sheet, I just didn't quite catch your exact meaning from the initial post. If "this was covered in 1st year in course CS100, you need to brush up on this. Have a look as blah book/webpage" is not an example of a bulshit answer then I don't think I've ever given a bulshit answer nor do I see a need for them.
One I have had to use reguarly is "I'm affraid this is beyond the bounds of this course but if you're interested have a look at X", I'd argue this is not bulshit and you seem to agree so we are all in agreement!
Good post Des. Theres another situation where the second bullshit answer is used a lot. Its where the students have NOT covered a particular topic in previous courses. Say a fairly major topic, like the C programming language. The lecturer has failed to check this, and assumes the knowledge. The lecturer either gets annoyed, and dumbs down the course a bit, or just carries on as before. You can argue whether this is the lecturers fault, or that of the ""course co-ord-in-ator"". But this does happen quite a lot, it certainly happened a few times while I was in maynooth.
I had the miss-fortune of demonstrating labs for a course like that. About 50% of the labs were in C and the assignments sheets stated that students had learned C in first year ..... thing is .... they hadn't! And now that I think of it, I did the identical course as an undergrad with the identical lecturer who made the identical false assumption and despite being told by students he continued to do so for about 5 years.
This is just not good enough for a University and is most certainly a good example of a bulshit answer 'in action'.
Phil/Bart,
Yeah, that is a massive problem in this university, I agree. It comes back to point 11 on the 12 Step guide I wrote. 11. Do you verify all your assumptions about the prior knowledge of the class Fundamental really.
I presume the "very talented programmer" was Joel Spolsky? If not, who else should I be reading?
I think it was actually Cian who I first saw using that convention. I remember thinking it was wrong, but not wanting to say anything about it
Who else should you be reading? Well Joel, Jeff Atwood (www.codinghorror.com/blog), Eric Sink (http://software.ericsink.com/index.html), there are others but they don't spring to mind. I don't use a newsreader anymore, my attitude is basically "if I can't remember it, its probably not worth reading it regularily".
it is so tru that some teachers are incompitant for the work in clasrooms. and you wunder why the education department would hire people with no knowledge of the subject they are suposed to teach. and i have found that some of thee student who were woried about keeping up in classrooms had more prior knowledge than the teacher ever had.
"Niniane WangShe is yet another hot girl working for Google. I'm convinced Google actually manufacture good looking software engineers."
If you don't want to alienate your female readers, maybe you should think twice about describing somebody as "a hot girl" first and a software engineer second. Of course, if you don't particularly care about how your writing is perceived by those who aren't heterosexual men, then carry on.
I emailed Kirsten explaining this, and offering an apology. When I write things I very rarely think of who will be reading them and how will it affect them.
I'm not changing the post, cause that would be changing history basically.
It's very hard for men (for me at least) to know what they should or should not write. I for one would like to be called a "hot boy"
. So I think it's good that you pointed that out.
The reason why you wouldn't mind being a hot boy but many women mind being called a hot girl in a context where their professional abilities should be more relevant is that for women, there's generally a perception that a woman who is attractive can't also be intelligent and competent, whereas there's no analogous perception for men. I can't speak for everyone, but I think most women don't mind being called "hot" in and of itself; they mind because usually, for a woman, somebody calling you hot means they're implying that that's your only positive attribute.
But surely in a case where I have mentioned their abilities, and referenced 2 quality links from a persons cite I am being pretty clear about the persons abilities.
I would accept your point if I had linked and simply said "Check out the pic OMG", but I did, in fairness, mention she is a Google engineer (which pretty much proves she is incredibly talented), and also that her website has some very good material on it. Anyone who visits the site would realize within 8 seconds or so that Niniane is a very smart individual. I accept your points about alienating readers, and also about referring to women as girls, although the second is a colloquialism in Ireland, however I don't think I am in a position to even begin to imply that Niniane is anything other than an extremely talented engineer. Anyone who reads this article and presumes that "if she's hot, she isn't likely to be too smart", is pretty much fucked already intelligence wise, and I certainly am not in a position to school them.
There are a few signs to see if your teacher is good or not.
Check if your teacher is curious. Check if your teacher is able to doubt his/her knowledge. Check if your teacher is strong enough to admit that there are some things that he/she does not know. Anyone displaying authority when unneeded is an insecure person that should not be there teaching all the other insecure students in the first place.
Thanx Des thats really great! I have wanted to get into programming for a while now and your and other websites on reddit has inspirwd me to give it a shot!!!
What pointers can you give a noob like me? Which languages should i take a look at? Theres alot to choose from! Should i do java, c#, ajax, python, xml, assembly, or what? I heard from my friend that assembler is hardcore so maybe something else easier to start with, eh? I also am really intrested in media stuff so graphics and video type programming would be something cool to do. Waddaya think? And what editors and compilers and tools should i use? And what about extreme coding? That sounds pretty cool..... Talking of teachers all mine were soooooo bad and boring and some were such dumbasses. Your so right. I didnt learn any thing at school. I'm all self-learnt pretty much. Just done some reading on the web and stuff. And learnt a lot. You can learn from the best on the web! Anyway, would apreciate some tips to start me in the right direction. Thanx a million!!!
Hi n008,
I'm glad you liked my post. The first thing I would stress is find someone who will be able to guide you through the process, even a programming forum will do. As for what language you learn, it shouldn't really matter so long as you learn it properly. If you want to make cool stuff happen quickly, the go with a web development language(Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby, ASP etc), but bear in mind that in scripting languages there are a lot of details hidden from you that other languages(C/C++/Java) will catch you out with. It's also important to note that web design and media wouldn't be considered programming, more just marking up documents. Friends tell me that Video editing is best done with C++ or Visual C++, but I don't have the familiarity to confirm that for you. Let me know how you get on, and feel free to ask more. Des
"If you want to make cool stuff happen quickly, the go with a web development language(Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby, ASP etc),", I would mention Cold Fusion in that list. It might be lesser known, but it will get you producing useful applications much quicker that ASP ever could. The dev version of the server is free to use.
All in all, great post.
Fair point Reuben,
I have absolutely zero experience with coldfusion, hence its absence. I'll take your word that its good for getting started. If you know of any good intros, feel free to mail me them, or post them here. Thanks for reading, Des
Nice article. Also a point to note is unlearning the bad habit can be annoying. The other problem when good students learn bad stuff they in turn pass it on to others their bad skills unknowingly
 And a story I had to tell a teacher after getting frustrated: This little kid was asking his mentor something he did'nt understand, and after some thinking the guy tries to explain the kid, which he does'nt understand, so he tries to explain him the second time a little bit better and the kid still does'nt understand, so the third time he answers the question properly but the kid unfortunately does'nt understand yet, the mentor gets mad and tells the kid. Even I have understood after trying to explain it to you and whats up with you. There are teacher who have been teaching for years and still struggling to get the answers straight.
> if (0 == i) instead of if (i == 0)
I like this one. I also avoid to ever type rm -r but always enter full path rm -r /usr/local/app/logs/ to avoid common mistake of typing in the wrong terminal/directory/server/etc... |
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This website is the online diary of me, Des Traynor, a User Experience Researcher in Dublin, Ireland. I work with Contrast. I usually write on 5 topics: I update about 3-4 times per month. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss this good stuff. If this is your first time here, check out the archives.My official homepage provides more information about who I am, and what I research. You can contact me at destraynor [at] gmail [dot] com Quicksearch |
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