My demotivation story took place in my junior high school in China, where we had our first intro to programming class using BASIC. The teacher told the whole class that if anyone did not understand the recursion lecture, he/she should not continue programming because he/she won’t understand the rest of the class to be a good programmer. Not sure how much truth there was behind his statement, but I was one of the ones who didn’t understand what recursion was about. I think a few kids who took some extra classes in advance or who were “born programmers” actually understood the concept of recursion and could write some functional code in the lecture. Instead of encouraging us to try to understand recursion differently, the teacher basically told us there was no hope and we would be lucky to pass the class. I eventually passed it but I remember that the class turned into a less-enjoyable experience, because in the back of my mind I was telling myself I’d never be good at it. It was an optional class and was supposed to expose us to new topics that were interesting and different from the regular junior high school curriculum. Unfortunately I think many of my classmates were discouraged to tinker around with recursive codes and gave up after that lecture.
If the teacher had addressed the difficulty to understand recursion, but encourage us to practice and find out why our codes didn’t work out, we’d be more likely to pursue further in programming.