TITLE: Surrounding Yourself with Beginners AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: February 23, 2017 4:08 PM DESC: ----- BODY: This comment at the close of a recent Dan Meyer post struck close to home:
I haven't found a way to generate these kinds of insights about math without surrounding myself with people learning math for the first time.
I've learned a lot about programming from teaching college students. Insights can come at all levels, from working with seniors who are writing compilers as their first big project, through midstream students who are learning OOP or functional programming as a second or third style, right down to beginners who are seeing variables and loops and functions for the first time. Sometimes an insight comes when a student asks a new question, or an old question at the right time. I had a couple of students in my compiler course last fall who occasionally asked the most basic questions, especially about code generation. Listening to their questions and creating new examples to illustrate my answers helped me think differently about the run-time system. Other times, they come while listening to students talk among themselves. One student's answer to another student's question can trigger an entirely new way for me to think about a concept I think I understand pretty well. I don't have any recent personal examples in mind, but this sort of experience seems to be part of what triggered Meyer's post. People are always telling us to "be the least experienced person in the room", to surround ourselves with "smarter" or more experienced people and learn from them. But there is a lot to be learned from programmers who are just starting out. College profs have that opportunity all the time, if they are willing to listen and learn. -----