Quote: Douglas Adams. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

[R. Andrew Lamonica]

The Late, Great Douglas Adams author, environmentalist, technology lover and king of all things ironic wrote the following in one of his Dirk Gently books.  I am convinced that it describes why programmers program and why teachers teach better than any serious explanation ever could.  Enjoy.

Location: The dining room at a university failing to be unlike Cambridge.  :-)

   "Now wait," he interrupted before Richard even had a chance to start, "don't I vaguely remember that you had some sort of computer when you were here? When was it? 1977?"

   "Well, what we called a computer in 1977 was really a kind of electric abacus, but..."

   "Oh, now, don't underestimate the abacus," said Reg. "In skilled hands it's a very sophisticated calculating device. Furthermore it requires no power, can be made with any materials you have to hand, and never goes bing in the middle of an important piece of work."

   "So an electric one would be particularly pointless," said Richard.

   "True enough," conceded Reg.

   "There really wasn't a lot this machine could do that you couldn't do yourself in half the time with a lot less trouble," said Richard, "but it was, on the other hand, very good at being a slow and dim-witted pupil."

   Reg looked at him quizzically.
   "I had no idea they were supposed to be in short supply," he said. "I could hit a dozen with a bread roll from where I'm sitting."

   "I'm sure. But look at it this way. What really is the point of trying to teach anything to anybody?"

   This question seemed to provoke a murmur of sympathetic approval from up and down the table.

   Richard continued, "What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that's really the essence of programming. By the time you've sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you've certainly learned something about it yourself. The teacher usually learns more than the pupil. Isn't that true?"

   "It would be hard to learn much less than my pupils," came a low growl from somewhere on the table, "without undergoing a pre-frontal lobotomy."

-Douglas Adams. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

[Jerry]

Actually, teachers learn more when their students push them to explain beyond the obvious.

In Artificial Intelligence the best programs are those that completely suprise you with their results. This pushes you to think hard and deep about how your program is applying and generating knowledge, which hopefully leads to a new theory of intelligence. This is true particularly in Machine Learning when a program gains experise beyond its orginal program, beyond the knowledge of the programmer, and beyond the experts themselves.

So, its not the slower students that push us to learn as much as the quick ones who look beyond the obvious course material.