Teaching

For some reason, since the weekend I'm pretty down and yesterday's events did improve anything. I had an exercise session in Software Verification and the exercises were to be done with pen and paper which suited me fine since I don't know much about separation logic and I am curious to see how convenient it is to use it to solve day to day programming problems. First disappointment: instead of presenting a collection of usable manipulation rules and theorems, he gave us an intuitive notions of what the logic is about and expected that it would be enough to solve the problem. This defeats the whole purpose of using formal logic and I equate with no less than giving up the teaching of the topic. To my liking, something good enough for the exam but unusable afterwards is a total failure of teaching Second disappointment: we had to write a program with a loop and prove its partial correctness. He mentioned techniques of weakening the postcondition to obtain a loop invariant but he said that he would not teach it since they were not likely to have to find an invariant at the exam. Instead, he suggested to (with no alternative, we could say imposed on) the students to execute their loop on paper and, through guesswork, to find the relation that is preserved throughout the iterations. This is at best a very clumsy way of finding a loop invariant and I am sure that, for many students, it has driven home the message that formal methods is no more than an academic exercise instead of something useful that they can use when dealing with hard problems. And it is not like he did not know that they are very useful for the direct derivation of programs or that he thinks that it is inefficient problem solving. The only conclusion left is that he thinks students are not up to it. That's sad to have such a poor esteem of the people that came all that way to learn something. And I don't mean that I'm the only one victim of that practice (actually, I don't consider myself a victim at all since I think lectures are only for administrative purposes; my true learning is done on my own time with books and smart people) but I think of the people that worked all through their bachelors to end up with some farce of a lecture. Even though I am aware that not everybody is as motivated as me for learning new material, I would think that the time spent there could be better spent doing something else. I feel better already, having said that! Simon