do as yer told
I remember a story I heard recently about a young boy whose family moved to a new town and he was enrolled in a big and intimidating new school. The story, included in a 1982 book written by Mary Schramm, “Gifts of Grace,” continues about how the boy was afraid of all the new circumstances at first, but that he overcame his initial fears.
One day his teacher told the students to take out their paper and crayons, they were going to draw pictures of flowers. This really pleased the young boy because he loved to draw flowers.
He emptied his box of all 64 colors of his Crayola collection and was ready to draw some beautiful and colorful flowers. But when everyone started to draw the teacher stopped them. She then demonstrated on the board, drawing a red flower with a green stem, and she told the class that was what they were to draw. And the young boy did.
There was another exercise, this time with clay. The little boy thought he would shape a snake with his clay. But the teacher showed them how to make a bowl. And the young boy did.
So it went, day after day. Red flowers with green stems. A bowl, not a snake. What the teacher demonstrated, not what the young boy’s imagination dictated.
The next year, the boy’s family moved again and he was in another new school with another new teacher.
One day, she told them they were going to draw flowers, so they should take out their crayons and papers and get started.
But the young boy waited for further instructions. Finally, he asked what kind of flowers and what colors should they use.
The answer was simple: Draw any flower you want and use as many colors as you want.
When they had finished, all of the students turned in their drawings.
And when the teacher came to the young boy’s offering, she saw that he had drawn a red flower with a green stem.
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So here I sit, hours into redoing my programming assignment completed only days ago. Let me explain, I see programming as somewhat of an art, and it is, the design, the logic, the thought that goes into a program is varied and unique, as it should be. There are good and bad ways to do things, there are weird ways to program, funny ways, etc, expression can be had even in the dry sadistic world of a computer programmer. I take a great deal of pride in the fact that I can do quite a bit with what I know. I’m a quick learner and am able to incorporate new knowledge into application very rapidly. So needless to say I was a bit bothered by the fact that after spending a decent amount of time programming to obtain the proper result for a programming assignment, I was told to break it apart, do it on a dumbed down level of sorts. The professor had a series of steps that had to be followed, I argued the idea of the result, using proper methods, but my own directive and was met with no sympathy.
The thing that bothers me about this, is there are so many programmers who go to school, learn how to do it, come out, and follow instructions, to find one who can think for himself is semi rare, one who has an eye for the creative side of it. And what’s even sadder is the more of these basic programming classes I sit through, the more I feel like I’m just doing a “red flower with a green stem.” I mean, I hardly think of anything new with any of my IT related projects, I’ve come from innovation and think tanking to “did the book say to add that? Then why did you?” where initially I would have said “to see how it worked” or “I thought it’d be cool to put there” or “look how that saves time” I now get by with the bare minimum because that’s what I have to turn in anyway. I think in some way taking a break from it and doing some freelance stuff over the summer will help, just go back into some major design work so I can see with a directive eye again. Man, this semester is meeting a grateful end.