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I suppose my reply to him would be that the school has obviously been unable to teach him successfully thus far, and they're (supposedly) professionals at teaching, so how do they expect you to teach him when you're still learning.
Also, you signed up for a class to learn, not to teach people they failed to teach. If you wanted to learn to teach, you would have signed up for such a course.
While true that you will have to deal with similar situations in the future, you will typically have much more recourse - like going to the person's manager with this issue and have them do something about it. Obviously some cases there isn't much you can do, like when the person is the child of someone higher up, but by and large I've found that raising the issue to their manager helps a lot, if not outright solves the issue.
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nbgangsta wrote: So, what should I do?
See this[^] reply. It's good advice.
/ravi
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That's what I had to do in the same situation.
Dave.
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I have been out of school for a few years now, but I am well versed in dealing with people that don't have a clue what they are doing.
College :
I was with a guy that had to be mentally ill in some way, on a project that was basically a 3 tier website. He often would cry when he had trouble understanding things. Yes, cry!. I was faced with the task of getting a project done in a week with a guy that wasn't very much help. I could do it alone but I would be up nights and have zero time for testing or flashy stuff which is where I really learned the most. What I ended up doing was assign him a list of pages and have him build them as static pages with a css file and then I built the database and back end logic and gave him some help connecting them but always made sure he looked it up at least once before asking me. He ended up failing out after he had some sort of break down.
The Great thing about learning to deal with dead weight :
My first job after college was a programmer for a call center where I was the only one there that had any clue at all. Not a great place to learn, but the idiot that built the the foundation for there system with visual basic and MS Access was my boss. He had no education beyond high School and this was the only technical job he ever had. So having experience at being tactful and educational came in handy.
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nbgangsta wrote: Isn't teaching their job?
Only in advertisement. Those who can, code. Those who can't, teach.
You're venting over a student, while it's clearly the institution that you should be venting about.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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nbgangsta wrote: Isn't teaching their job?
Not really. It may seem like semantics, but enabling learning is their job. IN this they seem to have failed with your partner, though.
Have you looked how the project will be scored? Is there some sort of individual feedback whereby you can show who did what, how much was contributed by which partner? That was the case when I did teamwork at Uni, so freeloaders attracted lower marks due to the feedback of the rest of the team (and often their own feedback was pretty honest too!)
Certainly speak to the teacher, often and honestly, and give them as much positive feedback as you can - i.e. don't say "my partner is crap, it's a lost cause, it's not fair!" but say
"I have tried teaching him some OO concepts but obviously my skills aren't good enough to get the concepts across - I've assigned him some simple tasks, but that puts the burden of the project on me - so I don't have enough time to help him - maybe it would be possible for you (the teacher) to help him out?"
If the teacher is worth his salary he should give some time to your partner and will hopefully realise if he is a genuine lost cause - but at the very least will be able to look at your part of the project favourably, even if the project as a whole is not as good as it could have been.
Also make sure you document everything - who does what, who turns up for meetings, lectures etc. Should you have to go to another member of staff about this, then you will have real evidence to support your case.
MVVM # - I did it My Way
___________________________________________
Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011
.\\axxx
(That's an 'M')
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I have to deal with the same situation here at work, but for the fact that it won't be over at the end of the semester...
I think the advice about 'real life' is very good: the working life as taught in the schools has nothing to do with what really happens next.
And I was in the very same situation than you for a project in my school, went through the same questions, and I finally decided to do the project by myself. The other student was drunk every other night, so not much of an help. He was eventually kicked off from the school.
So, basically, just ignore him. You'll have tons of other situations later in which dumb people will be getting praise for your work, so be prepared.
~RaGE();
I think words like 'destiny' are a way of trying to find order where none exists. - Christian Graus
Do not feed the troll ! - Common proverb
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We've a guy who is retiring after 30+ years of service.
He's really old school - to the point where when he looks for files on his computer he still runs off to the DOS prompt. He is also very paranoid about backups and because of his mania we've files dating all the way back to the mid-90's. We don't have software that can read those files, but we do have the files.
So now he's cleaning out his desk and his filing cabinets and he brought by a 6 inch stack of paper that is a balancing report from 1995. The interesting thing about this stack of paper is that it represents the balance on a new system after is was converted - a system that we just moved back out to the vendor.
The report has been thrown away which is why I contacted the vendor today and asked them in our next meeting to claim that they've found a small bug in the software and that it would be helpful if they could get a look at a balance report from September of 1995 - the exact same report this fellow has held onto for 18yrs and now has just thrown away.
I wanna see what our retiree has to say to that. 
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The vendor has contacted me and told me that they're all in... 
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Leave the old guy to retire with peace
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He's the kind of guy that would appreciate this sort of thing.
No worries.
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MehGerbil wrote: to the point where when he looks for files on his computer he still runs off to the DOS prompt
Are you saying there is a better way to find files? 
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Yeah, that was my reaction.
Though I use cygwin so I have access to find, awk, grep, and perl.
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Watched a documentary on Stan Lee last night, "With great power." He's 90 years old and was in his late 80s when this was made. And the guy is still a live wire.
Someone asked him about retirement and he said most people retire and say, "Now I can do all the things I enjoy." Stan followed with, "But these are the things I enjoy! Don't punish me by making me retire."
The guy is 90 years old and still a force of nature. Even if I hadn't grown up reading Fantastic Four, Spiderman, et al, he would be one of my heroes for this reason alone.
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LOVE IT!
Can't wait to hear of the  ,  ,  ,  , and, hopefully, the responses from the Retiree!
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Ohhhh you bastard! 
MVVM # - I did it My Way
___________________________________________
Man, you're a god. - walterhevedeich 26/05/2011
.\\axxx
(That's an 'M')
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that's hilarious but evil. You better do something really nice for him lest the negative karma doesn't bite you....
Charlie Gilley
<italic>You're going to tell me what I want to know, or I'm going to beat you to death in your own house.
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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You're mean! But that's funny, too!
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.-John Q. Adams
You must accept one of two basic premises: Either we are alone in the universe, or we are not alone in the universe. And either way, the implications are staggering.-Wernher von Braun
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.-Albert Einstein
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I just received a Code Project Offers e-mail with the subject line "Kick start your career with new dev skills".
I read it as "Kick your career in the balls".
Where's my resume... 
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: Kick your career in the balls
Been there, done that.
Veni, vidi, vici.
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When I read the subject, I thought that CodeProject was now offering e-mail addresses, an in <yourname>@CodeProject.com.
Thoughts anyone?
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This sounds like a good idea.
Added bonus that CodeProject is Canadian, and assuming that their servers are physically located in Canada, would be less easily compromised by the data snoopers from the NSA and FBI.
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In theory, the FBI is limited to the borders of the U.S. The NSA charter is to monitor global signals intelligence, so the Canadian border means precisely dick.
Software Zen: delete this;
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My ISP intercepts all online searches or just the ones that google don't find and pops up their own search page. Rather annoying.
So if you tell me the traffic going thru my ISP is not monitored in some way or form.......
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For us Americans, it would make the email MORE likely to be snooped.
In theory, domestic internet traffic cannot be datamined without a warrant. To get around this, the various spying agencies have been rerouting domestic internet traffic to various foreign locations, datamining it there, then routing it on to its destination. Traffic that is actually international does not need to go through this ruse, as the US courts have held that data which crosses a border is not protected, even if that traffic is intercepted within US boundaries.
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