Helping Doesn’t Always Help

My programming students are working on their final/semester projects. As is typical some of them are doing extra work on their projects at home. Normally that is pretty great. They get better projects and they learn that they can continue learning and coding on their own. Some students get help from parents. We’re in a pretty high tech area and lots of parents are software professionals.

I don’t blame parents for helping. Parents are a students first and best teachers. Most times parents work within the scope of what their students are learning in school and do a good job of explaining what they are showing. But occasionally we see some code that really begs for a discussion with the student to see if they actually understand the code they are using.

Usually the clue is that the code includes features that are not covered in class. The Ternary operator ( ?: ) in C-family languages for example. This is not something we really have time for in a single semester first programming course. It’s pretty cool and really useful in the right circumstances but it can be an extra cognitive load for beginners.

Again, teaching this operator is a great thing. Having a student include it in their code without understanding it is another thing completely.

It’s not just parents that do this. Students do it even more often. One student discovers something cool or useful and shares it with others. The first student usually has a pretty good handle on it but don’t always do a good job of helping the other student understand it. Students, like the parents I see helping, mean well.

It drives teachers crazy though because it makes it hard to tell what a student understand and what they included just because someone told them it would solve their problem. This is one reason I still do quizzes and plan to do more next year.

Society tells students that the result – a good grade – is the important thing. For many students, and a few too many parents, grades and learning are independent. Teachers mostly see their job as teaching and not grading. It would be easy to just give everyone an A and make them happy. In the long run though we wouldn’t be doing anyone any favors.