A wrap on Languages

With last night's exam and submitting my course eval this morning, Languages is done (for reasons, I'll get to shortly, that last one is actually part of the course). I will put together a more comprehensive summary of the course after the Algorithms final, but here are some quick thoughts:

• The course was waaaaaay too easy for 4000-level (mixed grad/undergrad). This is more what I would expect Sophomores to deal with. In fact, with the exception of the OOP chapter (which didn't really exist in 1982), it IS the course I took my second year at RIT. Strike that, the RIT course was harder; we had to write actual working programs in Lisp and Prolog rather than just a few example functions. Also, RIT packed it all into a 10-week quarter. Granted, the students at RIT are a step up from UMSL and 35 years of programming have given me a knowledge base such that no Languages course appropriate for undergrads is going to be particularly taxing but, dang, this was ridiculous.
• As if the material wasn't easy enough, the grading was loaded with a bunch of "bonus" stuff. Each exam had bonus questions and there were 5 bonus points (standard 100-point scale) offered against the FINAL average (not final, exam, average for the entire course) simply for filling out the student survey. Seriously, if you don't get an A in this course you need to drop out of school.
• I think the fundamental problem was that we spent too much time on WHAT and not enough on WHY. I don't know why any class time in an upper division course needs to be spent on presenting facts. If you can't get those from a book after three years of college, you've pretty much missed the point of education. Class should be used to discuss why the facts matter.
• The book sucked. Sorry, just can't think of anything good to say about it. Perhaps that's some of why the lectures devoted so much time to restating it. A better solution would be to find a decent text.
• The selection of material was pretty appropriate. I think we probably could have got through the entire text if the classes were more focused, but given that the instructors (there were two sections which stayed basically in sync) were committed to rehashing the text, the chapters dropped were the right ones to go.
• The lectures got much better as the course progressed. I'm not sure what changed, but the second half was a lot easier to sit through. It was still too easy, but at least it was mildly interesting.