Also bothering me recently, it was my second day at work and this coworker got mad at me because I accidentally clicked the wrong thing on the register and wasn't able to undo the action, and he didn't like how I asked him for help after messing it up. Why would I ask him for help before accidentally doing something incorrectly?? He later admitted he was having a long week and apologized for his harsh tone earlier, but I still don't feel comfortable asking him questions. I'm still new and feeling vulnerable in this new environment, and I don't want to face his impatience or frustration, which seems to arise whenever I need help learning something new.
This reminds me of
something WarpRattler led me to back in July. Excerpted from the site:
"The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer for kids came in 2006, when Eben Upton and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, including Rob Mullins, Jack Lang and Alan Mycroft, became concerned about the year-on-year decline in the numbers and skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science in each academic year. From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design.
Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers. A number of problems were identified: the colonisation of the ICT curriculum with lessons on using Word and Excel, or writing webpages; the end of the dot-com boom; and the rise of the home PC and games console to replace the Amigas, BBC Micros, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 machines that people of an earlier generation learned to program on.
There isn’t much any small group of people can do to address problems like an inadequate school curriculum or the end of a financial bubble. But we felt that we could try to do something about the situation where computers had become so expensive and arcane that programming experimentation on them had to be forbidden by parents; and to find a platform that, like those old home computers, could boot into a programming environment."
This describes my childhood experience with computers (and their programming) to a tittle. I've known people who grew up with Commodore 64s in the 1970s and 1980s that ended up being great computer programmers and engineers. Though I'm usually able to learn enough to get by, I do still envy them at times and feel as though not having the right skill sets has cost (and will probably continue to cost) me job opportunities.
Cheers to all the teachers who encourage making mistakes, so long as students learn from them.
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