Monday, March 10, 2008

Super Stressed WTF Day

Wow, today was a day unlike any other. I guess that a number of factors had conspired to make this day an ultra stressed one, but the C++ students were the thing that almost pushed me over. Today was their final C++ lab. So, they had to complete a tougher exercise than before. And as usual, they were too stupid and lazy to do any work beforehand.

One of the chief failings of the way that they teach programming here is the cut-n-paste culture. Throughout their time here, the students are given skeletons and snippets of code that they are merely supposed to cut-n-paste into the proper places. As a result, many of them have not the slightest idea on how to write a simple C++ programme.

For their task today, they had to write a small programme to simulate the orbits of 3 objects around a single point. But unlike their previous tasks, they were not given a skeleton. They were still given bits that they could use, but not the overall skeleton. Most of them did not even know where to start and did not know how to even write the main() function.

So, I spent the first half hour drafting their programme for them on paper. I gave them the overall structure and showed them which bits to copy and paste in, which bits to translate from formula and what nots. Essentially, I gave them everything short of the actual code itself. But still they faltered. Some were just so bad that they could not even get simple assignments correct.

It got so bad at one point that I almost passed out. I started to feel woozy and excused myself from the lab, three times, in order to get some fresh air to calm myself down. It wasn't that I was angry. I wasn't. It was the feeling of despair that these students could not even write a simple Hello World programme. There was no hope in them finishing the task at all. That was extremely depressing.

So, instead of giving myself a heart attack, I ended up just writing much of the programme for them. Each time that they asked me a stupid question, I refused to answer them verbally but only pointed to the appropriate bit in the problem sheet. Then, they would go: oh! I felt like strangling them, but I could not even say duh to them, which further contributed to the stress.

I almost lost it with this bunch. If you know that you are not good at C++, at least read up the problem sheet and understand the problem before hand. Also, there is no excuse for them to not be able to even write a simple basic programme structure given that it's already the last week of term. I just do not understand some of these idiots morons imbeciles students here.

I am glad that it is over and I would not need to do any of these anymore!

PS: Just so to make this clear, not everyone here is retarded. There are some gems but they are in the distinct minority.

4 comments:

Dan said...

i think today i have met more stupidity than you have... i'll tell you more at lion dance tmr :P

yungchin said...

Hey! No need to hang out the dirty laundry!!

Venting frustration to the whole world = bad publicity. I suggest that next time you just strangle the supervisees, that's better for CU than blogging this...

:P

yungchin said...

PS: you make commenting too difficult!! Login *and* captcha (and it's *seven* characters)... dude.

Hint: Blogger allows OpenID commenting and no spammer is targeting that protocol yet :)

Dan said...

eh u didnt come.

grumble.