You can't tell people anything (2004)
I often think of this as &quot;it&#x27;s hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don&#x27;t have&quot;, or don&#x27;t know they have.<p>I think it&#x27;s one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it&#x27;s all telling people solutions to problems they don&#x27;t have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I&#x27;m not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people&#x27;s brains know when it&#x27;s a fake problem.) But a lot of times in math and science I think we&#x27;d be much better off leading off with the <i>problems</i>, and giving the students time to grapple with the problems without the answers, because <i>then</i> the answers would stick.<p>I&#x27;ve mentioned on HN before the git training curriculum I have made for my workplace... it&#x27;s an interactive tutorial, and rather than just walking you through solutions, it&#x27;s really more a guided tour of the problems that every git user encounters, <i>then</i> the solutions. We do merge conflicts, detached head (easy for git experts to forget how confusing that state is!), getting confused about why the things I used &quot;git add&quot; on now doesn&#x27;t show diffs, etc. It seems to work reasonably well.