A student cried in my office hours this week. Not something I did--just general stress, but I still feel bad about it. I'm getting tired of the students that think learning is a passive thing and put in the bare minimum of effort on the homework and then complain to me that class is hard. You can't pattern-match your way to understanding... Writing Haskell is fun--lots of meditating on what I want to do, then very little coding to get a lot done. Although, sometimes it feels like I'm learning to program all over again--it's idea of how you structure computation is very different from your standard imperative languages. Sorry for the programming heavy post but I've been doing nothing but teaching and writing for the longest time...
Not all classes are about learning, sometimes you just have to get though classes you have no passion for with the minimum effort possible, pass and move on. Its good to accept that not everyone has the same passion for the subject that you do.I'm getting tired of the students that think learning is a passive thing and put in the bare minimum of effort on the homework and then complain to me that class is hard. You can't pattern-match your way to understanding...
I teach Java(the class is called Computer Science but has just been Java so far) on Saturdays, and have recently had difficulty catching the 'students''(maybe it's too casual to call them that?) attention as we've been doing more object-oriented stuff(objects, instance and static properties etc.). I've not been able to make very captivating examples, because for the real use of objects to shine over spaghetti monster code requires they'd have to be pretty massive. Anyway, last Saturday I did just a little bit on exceptions and adding jars to the classpath and then we made IRC bots(Using Pircbot, that kind of networking is a little bit much right now...). They loved it, normally they'd be content watching Youtube(it's a very informal class) while they waited for me to help them with their problems, but last Saturday they were fighting for my attention rather than me fighting for theirs. And when they went on to do their own things with the IRC bots, things I went through in previous weeks visibly clicked with them. Maybe that was just an instance of a bad teacher becoming a less bad teacher, but I think it helps just to have fun with your students in your subject every now and then. Have you ever started taking a class with no intentions of putting in more than minimum effort, but then been won over by the teacher/subject?
I liked Computer science because I had a great teacher in highschool but I was also there by choice. I guess you need to ask yourself why you students are there in the first place? Is it a mandatory class? Is it elective? Is it just because seniors have nothing better to do on saturdays. It sounds like you already found something that inspires your students. The IRC bots are interesting, you could just take it apart piece by piece and show them how it works. Then have them remake it. I think that was a big miss about my programming experience when I was younger. We never got to work with real professional level code so it was really hard to see what best practices were. Also reading published code is a real skill that is very valuable that doesn't get enough early emphasis. To answer your question, yes. If the professor is passionate about the subject Im pretty easily won over even if I otherwise don't give a fuck about the topic an don't ever see using the info but you gotta be really f-ing good.Have you ever started taking a class with no intentions of putting in more than minimum effort, but then been won over by the teacher/subject?