On 9/8/06, Radenski, Atanas <radenski@chapman.edu> wrote:
You are obviously way more intelligent than the average student whom we need to teach. > Our job is to teach Python programming to anyone who may happen to be in our classes. What is good for you may not be good for ordinary beginners. Ordinary mortals > usually do not find the meaning of life in the beausty of import statements :-)
Ordinary mortals should. I don't like pandering to beginners, dumbing it all down for their sake. Arthur, a paradigm beginner at one point (an articulate one though) made it clear that *he* doesn't want dumbing down "to make it easier for newbies" either. He *hates* being condescended to (and I appreciate that). So I, for my part, as a teacher (professionally, I get paid), do NOT regard it as my job to dilute Python to whatever extent necessary. I talk about namespaces immediately, on the very first day, as I've chronicled in this archive. Teachers who don't: I compete with them, I say "here, you learn Kung Fu, there, they treat you like you'll never have skills."
I think the professors are very wrong here.
May be there are, or may be they are not.
Art
Atanas
And I *certainly* champion the right to take issue with "professors" even within their realm of maximum expertise (teaching, supposedly, but we many times discover otherwise). Kirby