[squeaky-clean]

I agree with the other commenter, though maybe with less profanity.

Think of it this way, helping people is good, right? So you should help the people who are trying to help you.

> this is because your attitude could prevent people from helping!

Likewise, the attitude of people who put in minimal effort and expect lots of effort from volunteers causes the volunteers to burn out and makes it less likely that people will help you. Heck, even if they don't directly quit, they'll even end up with other people telling them to stop helping people.

[Grothendank]

Basically the thesis is that we can make needy and hapless students less needy and more self reliant by publicly roasting the most needy and hapless students among them. So basically lets bully the students into being more competent, because we're sad that our naive approach didn't help them.

That's an ethically bankrupt position, and I reject it.

You're simply wrong here. Any teacher who starts to be paranoid about the ineptitude of their students will be MISERABLE. Instead, teachers must establish better boundaries, and better materials and methods for their students.

For instance, I've /been/ the hapless student, and you probably have been too. I've asked silly X-Y questions. I've refused to read the docs before asking questions that have been asked millions of times before. And what helped me was people linking me to articles on how to ask good questions and how to get good answers and generally how to help and be helped.

Throwing in the towel and saying "man these students are just too lazy and expect too much" is not going to help the community, and it's not going to make the students magically ask more insightful and considerate questions. In my experience working with tutors, professors, mentors, and students in both professional, open source, and academic contexts, no skilled and happy teacher thinks or talks this way about their students.

So if you want to relate to students this way, just realize that it's no better than haplessly trying to help everyone in the first place:

- It still burns you out and makes you miserable (in fact, it's the one of the end stages of burnout)

- It still fails to make your students more self-reliant

If that's what you want, please continue to denigrate people who, after all, simply want to be helped and don't know how to be helped.

[Kim_Bruning]

No one has put forward the thesis that one should roast needy and hapless students!

Rather the opposite. Though this document is written for people who ask questions, see also the section on how to help.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#idm667 (How To Answer Questions in a Helpful Way )

(Of course: this is ESR. He's ... opinionated. But does seem to have his heart in the right place in the end)