The thing about a liberal arts education ... is it prepares you to fail successfully and learn from that failure. ... You will all fail. That's OK.Linahon is an alumnus of our school who works in the music industry. He gave a talk on campus for students aspiring to careers in the industry, the theme of which was, "Learn to fail. It happens" More recently, I ran across this as the solution to a word puzzle in our local paper:
-- Jim Linahon
You've got to jump off cliffs all the time and build your wings on the way down.Bradbury was one of my favorite authors when I was growing up (The Martian Chronicles mesmerized me!) This quote goes farther than Linahon's: what other people call failure is learning to fly. Do not fear. A comment made at the Rebooting Computing summit about "embracing failure" brought these quotes back to mind, along with an e-mail message Rich Pattis wrote sometime last year. Rich talked about how hard our discipline must feel to beginners, because it is a discipline learned almost wholly by failure. Learning to program can seem like nothing more than an uninterrupted sequence failures: syntax errors, logic errors, boundary cases, ugly interface, .... I'm not a novice any more, but I still feel the constant drip of failure whenever I work on a piece of code I don't already understand well. The thing is, I kinda like that feeling -- the challenge of scaling a mountain of code. My friends who program can at least say that they don't mind it, and the best among them seem to thrive in such an environment. I think that's part of what separates programmers from less disturbed people. Then again, repeated failure is a part of learning many things. Learning to play a musical instrument or a sport require repeated failure for most people. Hitting a serve in tennis, or a free throw on the hardcourt, or a curve ball in baseball -- the only way to learn is by doing it over and over, failing over and over, until the mind and body come together in a memory that make success a repeatable process. This seems to be an accepted part of athletics, even among the duffers who only play for fun. How many people in America are on a golf course this day, playing the game poorly but hoping -- and working -- to get better? Why don't we feel the same way about academics, and about computer programming in particular? Some small number seem to, maybe the 2% that Knuth said are capable of getting it. I have heard some people say that in sports we have created mechanisms for "meaningful failure", though I'm not sure exactly what that means, but I suspect that if we could build tools for students and set problems before them that give them a sense of meaningful failure, we'd probably not scare off so many people from our early courses. I suspect that this is part of what some people mean when they say we should make our courses more fun, though thinking in terms of meaningful failures might give us a better start on the issue than simply mantras about games and robots. I don't think just equating programming to sports is enough. Mitch Wand sent a message to the PLT Scheme mailing list this weekend on a metaphor he has been using to help students want to stick to the design recipes of How to Design Programs:
-- Ray Bradbury
In martial arts, the first thing you learn is to do simple motions very precisely. Ditto for ballet, where the first thing you learn is the five positions.I like the analogy and have used a similar idea with students in the past. But my experience is that this only works for students who want to learn to programming -- or martial arts or ballet, for that matter. If you start with people who want to go through the process of learning, then lots of things can work. The teacher just needs to motivate the student every once in a while to stick with the dream. But it's already their dream. Maybe the problem is that people want to play golf and the martial arts -- for whatever social, business, or masochistic reasons -- but that most people don't want to learn to program? Then our problem comes back to a constant theme on this blog: putting a feeling of power in peoples' hands when we show them programming, so they want to endure the pain. One last quote, in case you ever are looking for a literary way to motivate students to take on tough challenges rather than little ones that acquiesce easily and making us feel good sooner:Once those are committed to muscle memory, you can go on to combinations and variations.
Same deal for programming via HtDP: first practice using the templates until you can do it without thinking. Then you can go on to combinations and variations.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!This comes from Rainer Maria Rilke's The Man Watching. What a marvelous image, growing strong by being beaten -- decisively, less -- by ever greater opponents. I'm sure you professional programmers who have been tackling functional programming, continuations, Scheme, Haskell, and Erlang these last few years know just the feeling Rilke describes, deep in the marrow of your bones. -----
What fights us is so great!
...
When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
...
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.