During the last 6 months I have been to India twice. It was for the purpose of teaching android courses. In both visits, I taught young software developers who work for a big amarican company that holds R&D department in Pune (India).
I chose to write this post in order to share my experience with my students in Israel. IMHO, most of them have more than a few things to learn from my experience.
It all started two months before the first visit took place. In a conference call with the software development manager in Pune (India) he asks me to send him all the training material in advance so his developer can go over that material before we meet. He also promissed that I won’t need to overview the first topics. They will come prepare. It happened exactly as he said. I could skip the basic parts, except for answering few questions that were left open following their self study. We could actually move forward and get deeper into the stuff unlike any other similar courses I have ever taught, except (maybe) for few Java courses I was lucky to teach in Haifa IBM Research Center during the year 2000 and except (maybe) for few Java courses I was lucky to teach in IDF (Mamram\Basmach) as part of my military reserve service.
During the courses themselves I could notice that before each topic students use some of the time allocated for practice to go over the next coming topic material one more time in order to refresh their memory and be ready. It was amazing. Thanks for the students dedication we could actually get deeper in each topic and eventually were capable covering more topics comparing with the original plan.
Learning software development is unlike any other profession, especially when you are still fresh and lack of experience. Unless you learn the material (even partially) in advance it is impossible to keep tracking the lecturer and it is impossible to exploit him.
This post is dedicated for most of my fresh students in Israel, who still have a thing or two to learn and change in their approach. For some of them it won’t be relevant as they have already adopted the right approach for their studies. That part is keep growing and that certainly makes me happy. Regarding the others, I hope they take the right decision on their end.
