Here’s my motivation video for Perl Grep. Sorry it’s a bit longer than the 3 minutes we were supposed to keep to — it seems like plenty of time until you come to do it!
To watch the video, I’d recommend that you click on ‘YouTube’, wait for YouTube to launch. Then pause the video, select 720pHd from the settings and watch as ‘Large Player’.
Demotivational Experience:
Educationally speaking, I’m a late bloomer. I wasn’t very interested in my subjects at high school. I just wanted leave school and leave home. One of the few subjects I actually liked was Latin. We had a course exam coming up so, quite unusually for me, I actually studied for it. The exam went really well and talking to my classmates afterwards about it made me even more confident that I’d done well. So, imagine my horror when I received my exam results back and the grade on it was “0%, See me”! The exam itself was full of ticks and I’d actually scored about 85% (a massive achievement for me at the time), so I couldn’t understand why I’d been given a zero. The teacher told me to stay behind after the class and when the class had finished and the students had left he asked me whom I’d copied off. I told him that I’d not cheated and that I’d studied really hard. In fact, had I been given a proper score it would have been better than anyone sat around me. My teacher wouldn’t have it and told me I’d have to take another exam by myself. I was distraught – I’d studied really hard and now I was being accused of cheating because I’d actually done well in something. My parents tried to intervene (I was only about 12) and told the school that they’d seen me studying hard for the exam and asked the school to compare my results with those that were sat around me to see if I’d correctly answered questions that people around me had answered incorrectly, but the school would have none of it and stood by the teacher, making me take another exam. The exam was written by my Latin teacher and I felt that it was much harder than the previous one. It was pretty obvious to me that he’d gotten a bit worried about the fuss I’d put up about being accused of cheating and the subsequent involvement of my parents, so he was making sure I wouldn’t do well on it. Although my test score was still much higher than I’d normally get, it wasn’t anywhere near the 85% that I should have been awarded from the first test and the Latin teacher pointed to it as vindication of his accusation.
So, how did I get over this and how did I turn it into something positive? Well, initially I didn’t. Latin just went on the long list of other subjects I wasn’t interested in and reinforced my negativity. After all, why bother trying hard if you’re just going to get accused of cheating, right? I did think about this incident a lot in later life as a turning point in my education. When I’d left home and gotten a more settled life, I went back into education, passing many of the subjects that I’d failed at school. I always wondered that if I’d been awarded the score from my original exam whether this would have spurred me on to better in other subjects. But I always looked back at that incident and used the injustice as motivation to keep on trying when studying for exams would get me down, or that essential bit of code kept on giving me errors. A university degree and a PhD later, I think it obviously helped!