I’m mentioning this because I have a hunch that a lot of it is miscommunication. I suspect many people don’t notice that I have added a question or an iteration and there may be a language problem. I don’t know.
I’ve just had a discussion closed and the only comment I made was : ‘I’m going to think about your suggestion and get back with another iteration’.
Next thing I know the discussion is closed.
Another thing that happens is that mentors only read the beginning of the discussion and not the last question I have asked. I can tell them of course but when discussions are being closed really quickly it becomes a thing as well.
I asked a question because I’m really stuck and I’m still stuck and I’m not really getting any further.
Linked List is not the easiest of algorithms and to work from an existing solution and getting that to a higher level, I wouldn’t know what to do with that myself but still, it stings that have this happen to me.
I do some mentoring myself, the ones I can handle and if I can get a grip on all the ins and outs of Linked List I’d love to mentor that as well.
I must say, and this can be coincidence, but this is not happening at all in the php exercises. I’ve had two fantastic mentors so far. In the javascript section, people add a comment and that’s it. There’s no discussion, there’s just a review.
It’s a popular section and maybe there’s just too many requests and I think it would be better then, to be honest about it and say, we can only review this because there’s just too many people here.
Alas, there’s no vetting for mentors. Anyone can mentor. Not all mentors are going to be thorough. If you are unsatisfied with a mentor, you can rate them poorly and block them, then request a new mentor for the exercise.
Yes of course. Then what’s poor ? I don’t like to show dissatisfaction when someone has actually made the effort to say something unless he/she did that just to up his/her reputation.
As a mentor, I think it is almost in poor taste to hit that “end discussion” button unless it is very clear that the student meant to do so, but missed it somehow. The reason is that as a mentor, I will not get notifications when there is a new submission, and so I lose a major part of the communication chain.
Instead, it should likely be left to the student to determine when they may need to be done with the interaction, in terms of what they want to get out of the experience. It keeps a mentor slot blocked for them, so there is a natural tendency to not hold out longer than them being active with the exercise, rather than waiting for a 30 day timeout.
I would let the mentor that does this know, as if they are unaware of the effects they are doing (as we do not vet them, there is not a formal ‘on-boarding’, they may not realize that they are kind of shooting both of you in the foot for doing this).
But for sure, if they continue doing it after being told, feel free to flag them as sub-par and consider blocking them so that you do not end up with continued noise.
PHP, fantastic experience. Joohan mentors almost all my algorithms and my record so far is 11 iterations for one exercise. He sends me links to articles (guard clauses, an eye opener, utf-8) and pedro-m-g sent me a link to an article that talks about divide and conquer strategies. To me these were entirely new subjects.
I don’t feel that I’m learning php, I’m learning to write better algorithms, in php and in javascript.
Javascript mentoring seems to have a different ‘culture’. I have had good comments that have pushed me forward but there’s no discussion feeling. I have mentored a few exercises and it’s my impression that people enjoy discussions. There may be a language barrier though and I wonder if everybody ‘gets’ the system. You have to check whether there’s a new submission and really open that discussion and read what people have already written. In the beginning I was ignoring that completely and I have to remind myself to do this. Kotp above says this as well and I agree with him.
By the way, I’m a school teacher. I used to teach German and English.
I know how to teach and it feels good to mentor. As Doris Lessing once wrote :
I agree, I have to remind myself to check for submissions and read what has already been written. At first, I ignored it completely.
And absolutely, if a student feels he/she no longer needs further mentoring, the discussion can be closed. I suspect a lot of them they don’t know this.
I think it’s less about a culture and more about the individual mentors you happen to get. JS might be more popular and happen to have more people testing out being a mentor.
In the last year, PHP had a total of 369 solutions mentored by 11 distinct mentors. 80% of those were by a single mentor, joohan. By comparison, JavaScript had a total of 1631 solutions mentored by 130 mentors. The most prolific mentor there was atk, who mentored 22% of all the sessions. So it seems one dedicated mentor is having a very large positive impact on the PHP mentoring experience.
Of the 130 JS mentors, 40 mentors had more than five mentoring sessions. So 70% of the JS mentors only did a couple of sessions. PHP has three mentors with more than five sessions so it’s a similar percentage of folks who mentored regularly. That makes me think it’s less to do with the mentoring teams and more how many students are taking a track like Isaac mentioned.
There is the struggle of getting a mixture of “enough information” but also avoiding the “wall of text” that can be overwhelming.
I tend to want to guide to and per iterations, focusing on 1-3 changes at the most per iteration, and then reacting to what the student does in response.
And at some point, if they are wanting to dig into the language, practice exercises are often set up so that it is not tied to a single approach, and so exploring different ways of doing the same thing (or subset of same things) gives that fluency that we are after, if the exploration is done.
But communication styles, what a mentor tends to focus on, what the student wants, and how they communicate all forms the entirety of the potential experience.
For “simple” exercises, such as TwoFer, this can sometimes be 20 or more iterations, since the problem being solved is simple enough that the language can often be explored rather than the problem.
For more complex problems, hopefully it is not the first time the student has requested review/mentoring, then the focus is often more about the problem being solved in the language, than perhaps the language itself. (So more algorithmic thinking.)
Similar problems to those described here I have with students. There are many who write a question and never reply. Or I write quite a lot of information, and the answer is just “OK” or “thanks”. And then just end the conversation.
But then there are those friendly and curious, and it’s a pleasure to interact with them :)
