CP4E was Re: Deitel and Deitel Book...

[Geoff Gerrietts]

Quoting Roman Suzi (rnd at onego.ru):
> On Thu, 7 Mar 2002, Simon Brunning wrote:
> 
> > > From:	Geoff Gerrietts [SMTP:geoff at gerrietts.net]
> > > For the space of around three years, a child is immersed almost
> > > constantly, from waking to sleep, and even sometimes while asleep, in
> > > language. For those first three years, the child is almost completely
> > > incapable of making him or herself understood.
> 
> Are you sure? My daughter makes herself understood by all available
> means. She built her own dictionary which we, parents, learned.
> What is interesting, she uses (internally) a hash table to
> convert from our language to her almost instantly...

I think I've answered this complaint with the original post several
times already, so I'm not going to do it again. As a nutshell, I'll
say that the range concepts a child is capable of expressing at this
age is much smaller than the range of concepts a child experiences --
barely one percent of the feelings you see flashing across the child's
face make it into language, spoken or gestured. That qualifies to me
as "almost completely incapable of making him or herself understood."

> I do not remember who told me this, but it seems that students
> better learn from poorly constructed lectures than perfect ones.
> Because, they need to be _active_ in constructing their own system
> rather than _passively_ "eat" readymaid knowledge frames.

This is an interesting point, and might be wrapped back into our
developing idea of a pedagogy. Building in defects might not be the
best idea, because that's likely to lead to criticism and even
dismissal by those who recognize the errors. But building in problems
that expect the student to engage the material and fill in the blanks,
that's something of an admirable goal.

Thanks,
--G.


-- 
Geoff Gerrietts            "Democracy is a form of government that substitutes 
geoff at gerrietts dot net  election by the incompetant many for appointment 
http://www.gerrietts.net/   by the corrupt few." --George Bernard Shaw