Teaching is said to be its own reward, and I believe that. I like it when I show someone something new, I enjoy seeing them smile at their new discovery and I believe that the world is based on a good education. So when I got a chance to be a teaching assistant in my university, I jumped at the chance. Every Monday, from 14:00 to 18:00 I try to the best of my ability to help first year students discover the world of computer programming with Java.

Does everyone like programming? Of course not. Should I expect them to be eager to learn and understand why things happen? Again, no. But for better or for worse, it is my job to help them pass the course at least with a C. And to that end I try to make them understand some basic notions because they will need those. So how to deal with people that just want the answer?

One student asked me how he should proceed with an exercise, I told him a basic plan, create the main class and then use a JOptionPanel to get the input from the user. Now this is a student that supposedly has used this JOptionPanel many times before in previous exercises. So when he asked me “What is a JOptionPanel?” I was stomped… After some time I realised that he never coded anything, he only got the code from friends, the net, a book or the lecture notes. He even asked me what that bit of code was for, even though he proclaimed that it was he that did it. He didn’t ever try to understand the code, he just produced a program that worked and was satisfied with himself.

When I asked him how he hoped to pass the exam that was to come next week, he remained silent. I still don’t know what the best course of action would have been, but I just told him to go back to the first exercise and try to do them all again by himself until he can do them without looking at previous examples, until he understands the code.

University is not about simply producing work. It is about learning. I like the fact that the British system will not pressure you to produce large amounts of work, that it lets you learn as much (or as little) as you want. In the end, the exams are designed to award those that really learned.

But the “teacher” in me wants everyone to learn, so cases like the one I just spoke of sadden me. He didn’t learn anything, he was just happy to make the programs work and now he faces a very real possibility of failing in the upcoming exams. And I do feel like I failed for not having noticed him before.