Messy learning and object oriented programming

Day 604 of 1000

Kelly and I have stayed up well past midnight several times this semester to work through assignments for her Java class.  In spite of the great joy it gives us to have our children at North Carolina State Universiy, I think they way they teach “Programming 101” is almost criminal.  They were told they should not Google anything or receive any outside help.  I understand the need for a student to “own” the material, but this is definitely not the way to do it.  Nevertheless, my support has been mostly limited to looking on and trying to give verbal descriptions of high level concepts.

Last night was very good as Kelly prepared for a five minute talk she has to give in class about concepts such as implicit vs explicit parameters, get/set methods, encapsulation, and other object oriented programming topics.  I remember when I learned all this and it was a fight.  Christian seems to be a very linear learner.  That is, he builds one concept on another until he achieves master.  Kelly and I are what I like to call messy learners.  We learn just enough about a subject to go on to the next step, but not enough to master it.  That means we are pretty much in a state of confusion until we go through enough of the “learn just enough” steps to get a coherent understanding of the subject as a whole.

Messy learning is really pretty painful, but when the light starts to come on, it is so wildly gratifying that one forget all the pain leading up to it.  After going through that kind of process for subjects like math, chemistry, and programming, it is not so bad starting a new learning project because the payoff is so great.  I think some of the problem associated with so many people hating math and programming in this day and age is that so many people give up before they get to the payoff a couple of times.