Assumptions
There are many great opportunities for realization and insight ahead, but there are also many obstacles standing in the way of you staying on a path of success. I find that uncommunicated assumptions can play a role in hampering progress, so please ensure you are suitably read up and aware of my assumptions coming into the course, along with my assumptions of your assumptions, playing the role of a studious student seeking enlightenment.
Let's also make sure we are on the same playing field by establishing some definitions:
student: A student is primarily a person enrolled in a school or other educational institution and who is under learning with goals of acquiring knowledge, developing professions and achieving easy employment at a particular field. In the broader sense, a student is anyone who applies themselves to the intensive intellectual engagement with some matter necessary to master it as part of some practical affair in which such mastery is basic or decisive. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student)
While a decent definition, I would argue that it falls short by not also indicating certain things that should be stated, so herein are some further assumptions:
- a student, entering into the educational environment of a particular class or degree of study (especially at the undergraduate level where we reside), DOES NOT need to have any prior experience with the subject matter. That is: if you are taking a course on introductory programming in a certain language, the student is not expected to know how to program in that specific language (and depending on prerequisites to the course, may not even need to know anything about programming at the introductory level).
- to learn something means you don't know it. Not knowing something, there's a state of not understanding, and not being aware of what a particular thing or concept is. A student taking a class to learn something necessarily needs to be in active pursuit of gaining an understanding, but is not expecting to come in knowing anything. Learning is often a mistake-ridden process of bumping around in progressively less conceptually dark spaces as patterns are sussed out and intuitive connections are established. We learn best from our mistakes, so a student that does not make mistakes, or that avoids opportunities to make mistakes, isn't being a good student.
- learning is build upon an ever-growing foundation (your life experience and knowledge, some derivation of society's and civilization's collective body of experience and knowledge), and to be eligible to take a college class, yes, SOME prerequisite knowledge is assumed, namely:
- you know how to and can/will read (input/consume)
- you know how to and can/will write (output/create/produce)
- you know how to and can/will do math/computations
- you know how to and can/will think
- you know how to and can/will ask questions
- a student's (or learner's) absolute BEST tool is the question, specifically the regular asking of them. You NEED to be regularly engaging yourself and the class with questions, and responses to questions. No two people perceive something the same exact way. One explanation is not ideal for every individual. If an available explanation falls short with respect to being clarifying or promoting understanding, you should ask a question. If an available explanation is clarifying, but then upon further thought creates confusion or makes you wonder about other, potentially related things: YOU SHOULD ALSO ASK a question.
The benefit of authentic education is that it transitions one from a state of predominantly not knowing what they don't know, to a state where while they may know that they know more than they did before, also then cultivates an important perception of then KNOWING that they don't know even more things.
Education isn't about certainty or comfort in attaining a set of facts and calling it quits: It is about coming to terms with the endless uncertainty of possible things that can be pursued or known. We can never know everything, but we CAN know that we can never know everything. We instead strive for a functioning subset where we learn enough to give us a foundation in the present, and consistently keep learning (although hopefully less so exclusively in a classroom as time goes by, but instead by the individual having gained enough experience to become a self-learner) to keep up with the demands of tomorrow.
So, as a student learner embarking upon and taking this class, know that I don't assume you know anything about the course you are taking, and that you will be reading and thinking and doing and computing and asking questions regularly so that by the conclusion of the course, you will have some greater idea of the nature of what was encountered in the class.
If you don't want to ask questions, for whatever reason, nor want to bother with expanding your horizons, in learning new and different concepts and ways of doing things (ie you want to remain small and stagnant), then I would urge you to reconsider taking this course: it is NOT a daycare to keep your mind and hands pacified. It is an educational environment where you will be tasked to grow and improve.