2003 Programming

[ChrisH]

Originally posted by Jnadke
I took Intro to Java in my Senior year of High School at the local University. 4 credit class. I passed with an A. It was a rather fun class, I fell asleep a lot, but the labs were interesting. To some people it may have seemed difficult, because they weren't motivated.

It wasn't necessarily that they weren't motivated. Back about 20 years ago I was a TA for a programming class in college. (BASIC and FORTRAN IV) One of the things the professor said was "approximately 25% of your class WILL fail. It isn't that you are a bad teacher or that they are bad students. Programming requires a certain turn of mind and some of them just won't get it no matter how hard they try. But when they do get it you will know"

He was right too. Some students walked into class and either had it already or caught on very quickly. Others never did. The fun students were the ones that caught on somewhere in the middle. Their quiz scores would go from 30% to 95% in a week and suddenly they would be all excited about the class.

The ones that never did get it changed their major and got out of engineering. They probably should not have been there in the first place. Not everyone is cut out to be an engineer, and that's OK. We need people to do all kinds of jobs, the important part is to do work you are fit for.