Sep 24 2008
The Most Irritating Person in the Classroom
This is the funny thing about online classes - you still get the same people. I find this amusing.
The most irritating person in real-live class discussions is that one kid. There is always one, there is usually only one. They treat the class like their personal showcase, arguing with the professor and classmates, offering help as a means of asserting superiority.
Sometimes they’re just anti-social douchebags who want to assert their own genius. I met one guy at college a few years ago who helped me with a paper I was writing in the writing center. One on one, he was very reasonable and did not come off as patronizing or as a know-it-all. Then again, maybe he could afford not to since I was already asking him for his expertise.
Generally speaking, while I hate these people wasting my class discussion time arguing with the professor instead of letting us move on to a different discussion point, I don’t mind people being cocky or showy if they have the knowledge to back it up, and the good sense to know when they’re wrong and admit as much. I am that person, sometimes.
I’m not surprised to find a number of cocky men in my computer classes. Heck, most times I’m not even irritated because I can simply move on to a different post by a different classmate and leave it at that.
But not when you do something wrong and instead of looking at your own work, assert that someone else is having the problem on their end. He’s not. You wrote something incorrectly. And just because everyone else uses programs that auto-correct it for them doesn’t mean that your error is acceptable. In the real world, if your client is unable to access your work - your work is worthless. Accessibility is an important factor.
Also, I hate my programming class because they keep telling us to download software to create web pages. We’re supposed to be learning basic html tags, and I mean basic. The only requirements are messing with text, centering something, creating a table, posting an image and creating a link. Why does anyone need a software program to create that page for them? What are they learning by doing that? Besides, most of those programs insert all sorts of crap into your code. Who needs that?
Unfortunately, all the instructions we get assume that we have downloaded software that will code our pages for us, FTP clients that will automatically upload those pages to the server, etc. So people who are interested in doing these things on their own have to figure it out on their own. I make Michael help me. I made my page in a shell session on a text editor. It does not look pretty, but it completes the requirements for the assignment. And at least if something goes wrong, I can look at my code and see it, instead of blaming the eyesight of the person who gets the finished product and sees a flaw.
PS. In my applications course, there are people saying children shouldn’t use computers until they’re in middle school. Seriously. I was using one at home as soon as I could, at the very least to play games. Michael said he started learning programming as soon as he could type and use a mouse. We played educational games at elementary school and used paint and Word. I remember because I got extra time in the lab to help the special education class use the computers. I just had to laugh about it. And hope that person didn’t have any young children, because they would be putting them at a severe disadvantage.
Correction - Michael wrote BASIC programs before we had a computer with a mouse.
He told me he wrote a program to tell jokes.
I had that one on a cassette for a long time, but I must have eventually gotten rid of it. As I recall it went like this:
10 PRINT “KNOCK KNOCK”
20 INPUT A$
30 PRINT “BOO”
40 INPUT A$
50 PRINT “DON’T CRY IT’S ONLY A JOKE”
The best part was how it totally discarded the user’s input, so you could type “POOP” instead of “WHO’S THERE”, which I thought was an absolute riot at the time.
hahaha that’s awesome.