TITLE: Passion is Job 1
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: February 06, 2008  2:37 PM
DESC: 
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BODY:
This
<A HREF="http://www.infoq.com/interviews/dave-thomas-agile-passion">
   half-hour interview</A>
with Pragmatic Dave Thomas starts off interesting enough
to listen to, and about halfway through it becomes even
more compelling, especially for academics.  Interviewer
Jim Coplien asks what advice Thomas would give to CS
academics.  Thomas has long been an industry trainer, and
a good one.  (I learned some Ruby from him fellow Prag Andy
Hunt at an
<!A HREF="">
   OOPSLA workshop</A>
in 2001.)  But he has not been a CS academic since leaving
graduate school a couple of decades ago.  Still, his answer
is marvelous:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
... one thing I would say that you have to be very careful
of, if you are an academic, is that you are dealing with
a very delicate product in your students, and ultimately
when a student gets into the industry it is not how well
hey can analyze a particular function or the depth of
knowledge in this particular architecture, it is their
passion that drives them forward.  And as an academic I
think you have a responsibility not to squash that passion,
I think you have to find ways of nurturing it.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

I can't instill passion in someone, but I can kill someone's
passion.  Worse, I diminish someone's passion in small
steps, in how I speak about the discipline, what I expect
of them.  When writing comments is more valuable than
writing code, I dampen passion.  When the form of a program
matters more than the substance, I dampen passion.

Unfortunately, I think that our K-12 system kills the
passion of many students.  This is not a criticism of
teachers, many of whom do wonderful, inspiring jobs under
less than ideal conditions.  The problem is more a product
of the structure of our schools and our classrooms.  At
the university, we'd like to think that we begin to
restore passion, and we do have more opportunities to do
so.  But we need to be honest with ourselves and stamp
out the spirit-killing parts of our courses, curricula,
and degree programs.  I cannot instill passion, but I can
stop killing passion.  And I can help it grow.

Thomas didn't have much in the way of concrete advice for
how to nurture passion, but he did say that teachers need
to motivate what they teach and what they expect students
to do.  Yes; context matters.  He also suggested that we
encourage students to be well-rounded and try to attract
well-rounded folks to the discipline.  Yes; the more
interesting ideas we have in our heads and in our classrooms,
the better we can learn, and the better we can program.

As an aside, Thomas talks some about how he recently took
up learning to play the piano, on the occasion of turning
fifty.  Early in this decade, I, too, began to
<A HREF="http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2004-07.html#e2004-07-12T18_58_55.htm">
   study piano</A>
as an adult.  In the year or so before I began writing
this blog, I had let myself become too busy to practice
and so fell away.  I hope to make time to return to my
study some day, for all the reasons that Thomas mentions
and more.
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