You can't tell people anything (2004)
I often think of this as "it's hard to tell people the solution to a problem they don't have", or don't know they have.<p>I think it's one of the major problems in the entire structure of the educational system... it's all telling people solutions to problems they don't have yet. Sometimes this is just unavoidable; I'm not sure how to turn geography into a problem you have. (I mean, you can fake it, but people's brains know when it's a fake problem.) But a lot of times in math and science I think we'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've mentioned on HN before the git training curriculum I have made for my workplace... it's an interactive tutorial, and rather than just walking you through solutions, it'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 "git add" on now doesn't show diffs, etc. It seems to work reasonably well.