Demotivating learning experience

Jul 9, 2014 • Aaron Erlich

I attended a large inner city high school in Seattle, Washington. Not that inner city schools in Seattle are bad by most American inner city standards. But the school’s reputation was based more on the fact that liberal well-educated parents sent their children to the school rather than the rigor of the academic experience. I skated through barely doing any work and garnering one B in my four years. I learned little math and no computer programming.

After taking a year off after college, I arrived at an ivy league college. I thought taking a year after college would help decide what I wanted to do with my life. It hadn’t, and I was grasping for a major. I first settled on cognitive science, which combined linguistics, logic, computer science,, and psychology. I thought it combined some of my interests in human behavior with concrete skills in the ever-expanding computer programming world. I had no experience in computer programming, but I took the intro class taught in C++. I found it challenging, but I worked hard and did well in the class.

I then fatefully talked to an upper level computer science major who had been a TA for the class. He encouraged me to take the honors computer science class, which my grade in the previous class entitled me to take. I walking into the classroom the next quarter and realized most of the students were talking like they had been programming since they were in middle school. And the probably had been.

The course was taught in Dylan and assumed a level of programming familiarity and sophistication I simply didn’t have and could not have mastered in my one introductory course. The assignments, which I did with a lab partner, seemed impossibly hard. The exams seemed even harder. I did not know what was wrong with me. I went and saw the professor after I felt that i couldn’t do the exam in the time allotted. He suggested I might have a learning disability. I went to see the learning disabilities staff on campus. She told me there was nothing wrong with me.

No one ever suggested I was simply underprepared for the class. I got a C-, by far the worst grade I ever received. For someone who had always been a successful student, it made me cringe. I dropped the major and took no more programming classes because I felt that I wouldn’t be able to succeed in the discipline.

In retrospect, some counseling to take the appropriate sequence of classes would have most likely ameliorated the situation. Instead of the professor suggesting I had a learning disability a quick discussion of my resumé would have uncovered that the course was probably not for me. This never happened, and I regret it. In my immaturity, I also made the mistake that failing at one course did not necessarily mean I couldn’t be successful at something. And that is my own fault.