What a computer can't teach you

Dave Paola

Designing a course that teaches people web development in 8 weeks presents a bunch of interesting challenges. Some people have been programming for 8 years, some 1 year, some never. Some have been exposed to HTML and CSS, some haven't, and some are experts. Take any particular knowledge and divide it into those three buckets: no experience, some experience, and experienced. Now put all those people together. What do you get? A mess. It's very difficult to cleanly divide the world into beginner, intermediate, and expert.

Half of our job is to curate content. Bloc is not just another resource. There are, for all practical purposes, an infinite number of "resources" for learning rails, javascript, jquery, SQL, test driven development, MVC, vim/emacs/textmate/edlin, ruby, HTML, CSS, and everything remotely related to any of those. A large part of what we do is cut away all the bad stuff and curate the web into the absolute best bits of content for our students to eat. At Bloc, you eat one juicy filet (with grilled asparagus) rather than a metric ton of Taco Bell quasi-meat in a mass-produced cardboard shell.

Computer-aided instruction is really promising. There are tons of companies exploring all the different facets of allowing students to self-teach, with various levels of success. However, I believe very deeply that what people need is a guide, not an assistant.

Once more: what you need is a guide, not an assistant.

Why? Because guides can teach you meta-lessons. What's a meta-lesson?

As programmers, we use skills everyday that apply to life in general. Tenacity, problem solving, courage, self-awareness, and more are all (to various degrees) required to be a good software developer. If this were not so, then we'd all give up as soon as we hit a wall. Sometimes it means googling an error and sifting through 15 stack overflow questions. Sometimes it means hopping onto IRC and questioning a bunch of strangers. Sometimes it means taking a break, and sometimes it means discovering the solution in the shower in the morning. These are things a computer cannot teach you.

You know that feeling of frustration when you've tried everything and the goddamn thing still doesn't work? An assistant can't help you there. Remember the last time you felt like an idiot because you mistyped a git command? An assistant can't help you with that feeling. When you don't even know what to ask, an assistant is worthless.

Assistants can't help you grow.

At Bloc, we teach you meta-lessons. We're guides, not assistants. We help you grow.