Education is a Journey
My Dad was and is a stickler for good table manners. he always insisted on them at home while we were growing up. One day I asked him if we couldn’t just be messing at home and do everything right when we were out in public. He explained that it was about creating good habits. If we did things right at home and got into the habit we wouldn’t have to try when we were out. It would just be natural and we would be less likely to get things wrong. It was a lesson I have never forgotten. It came to mind again while I was reading a blog post by Didith Rodrigo.
Students often do not use the tools we are trying to teach them to use. They don’t see the necessity for them in the small projects that we assign in school. Part of my comment on Didith’s blog was “they take the quick and dirty solution because they do not realize that the journey is as important as the destination. ” Sure we want students to solve the projects that they are assigned but the purpose behind assignments in not just to get the answer but to understand the tools that are used to get the answer.
In math classes we were always exhorted to “show the work.” Many students assumed, not completely incorrectly, that this was a partial defense against cheating. But in reality teachers wanted to see how the answer was derived. It was also as much a protection of students from losing points for typos and simple arithmetic errors as it was against cheating. But the journey to the answer was important in and of itself. The same is true in programming assignments. The real problem is communicating that to our students.
Comments
Anonymous
October 03, 2008
so true. about 2/3 of my classes are spent in "doing" but most of the kids just want to get it done for a grade. they seem to lack a sense of adventure or discovery. I had a 3rd grader (who can't remember his password) that he "used PowerPoint once at home" so I didn't need to teach it to him. After just a couple moments it was clear he knew very little but didn't want to discover more. I'm definitely rethinking my methodology and trying to justify a different approach.Anonymous
October 04, 2008
So what kinds of assignments can we give that will spur the use of these tools and techniques in a deeper way? It's a chicken-and-egg problem. I know that I didn't start writing good clean code until I had been burned more than once by my own lazy coding practices. In fact, I don't think I could even tell the difference between really solid programming and programming that "just worked" unless it was egregious. I definitely also get frustrated when students don't seem to be pushing themselves to really explore and get inside the things they're learning. So what can I do to help prompt that?Anonymous
October 05, 2008
This year I tried a new approach with my 2 AP courses in hopes of promoting the "little things" and hammer down good programming skills. I started by giving more small programs, things that focus on a very small concept, such as the if statement. The next assignment is another small program that expands on the if statement program and adds else ifs and else statements. This way the students have 2 practice assignments worth fewer points that I can grade easily and use to provide feedback to the students. Then when they get the big assignment where they apply more of their knowledge to solve the problem I don't feel guilty grading it harshly when they don't use good style. After using this for just a month I have noticed that as soon as the students get the second small assignment they seem more interested in expanding the concept and that has overflown into their big programs for at least half my students - a definite increase from years past.