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28
MAY
2014Are We Teaching the Best Things?
I'm in Denver right now, mostly to see family. Being the geek that I am though, you know I snuck a little time for the local Rubyists. One of those Rubyists that I was lucky enough chat with is Katrina Owen.
I always love getting a chance to talk with Katrina. She's so thoughtful that she raises the level of discourse and makes me feel smarter. Plus, it turns out that Katrina and I have been thinking about similar things lately.
For my part, I've been thinking about the various students that I've taught to program over the years. I have taught many and because they all learned from me, they learned roughly the same way. What's interesting to me is how different the results have been from that technique. In some cases my students were all set after our lessons and they just began coding up a storm. Other students didn't seem to feel they were ready yet though. They had more of a "Now what do I do?" attitude at this stage.
Katrina raised a similar point from her time teaching in a developer school. When they would get to teaching language basics, they would show several constructs and how they are used. This is similar to how I teach. Just as I have observed, this works for some students. They can just take what they know and run from here. But they also found other students felt a little lost at this point.
