Tony thinks..

[ Photo of Jennifer by Kunjan ]

Gen-Y’s are smart people, but unfortunately for them, their parents and teachers thought it was a good idea to shelter them from all of life’s difficulties… including the frustration of solving problems. It doesn’t help that these children were showered with empty praise growing up for mediocre ‘achievements,’ which took no effort, to boost their self-esteem. When everyone gets a trophy, the result is children who’s confidence is only exceeded by their incompetence. In this sense, former president Bush may just be the first of the Gen-Y’s (though he’s way too old). For more detail, read Narcissistic and Entitled to Everything! Does Gen Y Have Too Much Self-Esteem?

This is the story of how I helped Jennifer start to develop problem solving skills at 22 years old, by teaching her a little about programming. If you’re a programmer reading this, you’ll probably be tempted to laugh and call her stupid, but understand this — Jennifer is a smart girl. She graduated high school with a 4.0 GPA. Problem solving, however, is a different kind of skill which takes a lot of time and hard work to develop. Unfortunately, her education failed to teach this. Fortunately, it’s never too late.

Naturally, we started with a simple 1-line Hello World. I opened up the Python console and typed:

>>> print “Hello World!”

Hello World!

I handed it over to her, and she diligently typed the same thing. Success! We’re off to a stellar start. Next, I showed her to write a function which adds two numbers together. (Everything after the # on the line is a comment for non-programmers, explaining what that line does.)

>>> def addNums(a, b):  # define a function addNums which takes arguments a and b

print a+b          # add a and b together and print the result to the console

>>> addNums(3, 5)        # call the addNums function with numbers 3 and 5

8                                    # the result printed by addNums with numbers 3 and 5 as input

She followed by writing one that subtracts two numbers.

>>> def subNums(a, b):

print a-b

>>> subNums(9, 6)

3

So far so good. Now, I showed her this example:

>>> define foo(a, b):           # define a function named foo which takes numbers a and b

print “First number:”, a, “  Second number:”, b, “  Sum:”, a+b

>>> foo(3, 5)    # call the function foo with numbers 3 and 5

First number: 3   Second number: 5   Sum: 8    # the result printed by function foo

Now, I asked her to write a function (named print_name_age) which does this:

>>> print_name_age(“Jennifer”, 22)

Jennifer is 22 years old.

Now this was hard. She protested, “I’m tired, I need to go bed. I have class in the morning.” She wasn’t tired a second ago… “I don’t know what to do. You never showed me how to do this. You’re mean!” I had shown her how to add numbers, print numbers, print text, and write a function. I left the examples open so she could look back at them. She had all the tools she needed. All that remained was to combine them in the right order to solve the problem.

She looked back at me with her puppy-dog eyes and repeatedly asked, “What do I do??” I told her she wasn’t allowed to ask me any questions. She should think out-loud, and I would ask her questions to help her along when she got stuck. She tried for about 20 seconds and got frustrated, angry, and even lashed out at me, to which I responded, “If you want to give up and go to bed, that’s totally fine. I won’t think any less of you. Don’t do this for me. Only stay if you want to.” She thought for a second, and decided to stay.

This was a turning point. She was no longer doing this to please me or to look smart — she now wanted to learn for the sake of learning. That’s  a symptom of a  growth mindset (read How To Be Smart for more detail). Now she had a chance. As she toiled, she still repeatedly asked me “Is this right?” to which I would give the thoroughly unsatisfying response “I don’t know, try it.” I watched her slowly conquer her phobia of the “enter” key to test her code, bravely risking the prospect of a terrifying error message, which killed her spirits instantly. I patiently encouraged, “Code never works the first time. If something I write works the first time, I’m shocked, and I’ve been doing this for 10 years. Keep trying.” She was still very frustrated and struggled with concepts I thought she had already mastered. For example, defining a function and calling it. She would define a function, and then be disappointed that nothing happened, even though she hadn’t called it yet. It was clear, she hadn’t actually understood a thing she wrote earlier. She had just copied my code. In school, this approach works without fail, and that’s exactly the problem.

Still, slowly but surely I began to notice that she wasn’t looking back at me for guidance nearly as often (she can’t read my poker face), and I was starting to see lights come on in her brain as she referred back to the examples and tried to pick them apart. For whatever reason, she asked for paper, which I supplied because at least it meant she was finally problem solving. My patience was strained, but I didn’t let her see that. I watched quietly. About 10-15 minutes later, behold the glorious code that Jennifer wrote with no help from me:

>>> def print_name_age(a, b):

print a, “is”, b, “years old.”

>>> print_name_age(“Tony”, 21)

Tony is 21 years old.

At first she was a little embarrassed that it took her so long to write something that would take me 2 seconds, but I was truly proud of her, and I told her so. We rejoiced in the epic victory. I say that with no sarcasm. There is no greater feeling in the world, than solving a tough problem that caused you massive frustration. Every coder in the world knows this and experiences it on a regular basis. I’m glad I could finally share that with Jennifer. There was no more sour Jennifer. She had a big smile on her face and joy in her heart.

True confidence comes from overcoming challenges, not empty praise.

I would love to hear, your thoughts in the comments. Do you think your education did an adequate job of teaching problem solving skills? How often were you praised as a kid? Was it unconditional or did you have to earn it?

Tony Programming