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Teaching the ways of linux

A friend of mine is now living at a dorm in college, and he was very annoyed to learn that he couldn’t use mIRC. Apparently the school had blocked all IRC ports. Understandable, since filesharing on IRC networks has grown in popularity at colleges, I even know some people who really abuse their college connection by running IRC file servers. But of course this friend of mine just chats harmlessly in a couple channels. It was sad for me to learn that he couldn’t come in.

So I was on a mission! He’s doesn’t know anything about linux, but he’s smart and I figured he’d be able to figure out a shell account eventually. I got another friend to set up a shell account for him and began teaching the ways of shell accounts, irssi, screen and vim (yes, I even introduce newbies to vim, no need to get them starting off with bad habits *grin*).

I was thrilled with how quickly he caught on. I went through my usual repetitive teaching method of switching between each program, opening and closing vim, detatching and reattaching screen, all with a purpose of course, but getting him used to everything. It wasn’t long at all before I didn’t need to tell him each step. And he even exceeded my expectations by trying to add new things to his irssi config file that I didn’t specifically tell him to add. Some was incorrect and we had to debug, but boy is it great when people think for themselves!

I’ve spent so much time helping out newbies who email me about how-tos on my website, people in Xelium #support, linux newbies from manLinux.com, people who drop into the bitlbee channel… that i had completely forgotten how wonderful it is teaching something to a smart person. This is what I love about teaching, helping someone start off and watching them grow on their own, learning how to RTFM, and then someday coming back and teaching me stuff. Nothing more rewarding (and humbling) than having a student come back to you with more knowledge than even you have.

I had really tired of telling people exactly where the manual is, what bits to read, and still having them come to me asking questions that they wouldn’t need to ask if they had just read. I started to think that if I just copied the text from the manual into the email/forum/channel they’d finally get it through their thick skulls, because having someone spoon feed them the information is easier than just putting it on their plate.

Someone needs to make it clear that installing and maintaining a linux box is not going to be easy if you can’t even figure out how to burn a CD in Windows.

Yep, I’m bitter.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2004 at 9:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.