Send Ken To College

“The least of learning is done in the classrooms.”
- Thomas Merton

“What we become depends on what we read after all the professors have finished with us. The greatest university of all is the collection of books.”
- Thomas Carlyle

The two quotes above are among some of my favorites.  Upon first read you might think they cast professors in a negative light.  I do not believe this.  In my case, I want to grow up to be a computer programmer.  There is no professor on this planet that will have time to teach me everything I will need to know or that I should know.  I have to take some responsibility in learning outside of the classroom.

I have spent a lot of time listening to fellow students bellyache that the professor did not teach them this or that.  I usually ask them how much time they spent trying to learn it on their own.  I usually receive blank stares.  I then suggest that they spend some time outside of class or with some reference material other than the professor’s lecture.  Once they have read and partially digested this material, try posing questions to the professor on stuff you do not understand.

I spent a few years as a tutor in my community college days. I was supposed to be tutoring beginning programming students but often it was more like being a babysitter.  I would suggest they try something and for the most part they sat there and stared blankly at me waiting for me to start dictating code to them.  That was not my job.  I often time think the professors took great delight in me weeding out the incapable since they could not.  Of the 18 students that I had over three years, only one of them still has anything to do with programming. 

Let us keep in mind that this was a community college classroom and there were students in that classroom that had no business being there.  I believe some of them had issues using a computer, yet they thought they might be programmers.  There were some that were in the class because they risked getting welfare benefits cut and if the story that my slightly dubious acquaintance tells is to be believed one was even there to do nothing but find a husband.

We all have talents or skills and eventually we learn what they are and where to best apply them.  I can not sing, play an instrument or even write nice stories.  I will not be trying to do any of those for a living.  All of those things require work and practice outside of a classroom so why people seem to think a professor has time to personally hold their hand and spoon feed them everything, I will never know.