Confused by Guils teaching style

Hi Dennis Flannigan,

Congratulations on admitting when you don't understand something. That's something that I do very often, too, and I think all of us should be humble enough to do, plus it helps us move forward more solidly.

Having said that, I have to disagree with you on Guil's teaching style or speed. In my personal case, I can tell you I've understood A LOT of stuff that was before impossible to grasp for me, thanks to his very teaching style. In courses where he's teaching something new (see pointer number 2 below), he will even experiment and get his hands dirty with the code and the console and all right in front of your eyes, trying errors, problems, solutions and the like. That has helped me a lot. Sure, I can only talk about me on this.

A note about the speed: it didn't happen to me with him, but sometimes it's happened to me that they 'talk fast for me' (although is mainly when I still don't feel solid in the field I'm learning), and in that cases, the video player is my friend: it has a button in the controls to reduce the speed. I even come back 10 seconds at times, when I hang on thinking on the last concepts and get distracted, missing something.

Now here I wanted to give you some pointers that might be of help to you (or anyone else going through this)... or at least I hope they'll help. :)

1. Find the specific problem. Oftentimes, when you don't understand something, it's not because you have some kind of mental problem or you're not intelligent, but it's also not necessarily because the teacher/instructor is plain bad in his thing. Many times it's more like you need to identify which part is making it difficult for you to understand and why that happens. If you don't know the specific problem, you may not find a specific solution.

2. Refreshers and practice. Having said that, this is not a course that teaches you JavaScript, but one that teaches the new features of ES6 to those who already mastered the older features of JS described. For that reason, if you don't understand one feature solidly (or sometimes even if you do), it's a really great idea to just do some refresher with a course/workshop on that particular topic and applying it to a couple of mini-projects of your own. When you get back to the video, you'll feel like you're riding on nitro! :)

3. About promises. Take, in this case, what you mentioned about you have no idea what his example code is supposed to be doing. Well, I assume you referred to the second part of the video, where his code uses promises, so I strongly suggest you have a refresher on them. This workshop is excellent for that, and then try to use them a little in your old learning/working projects, or make a new one (a brief one) to apply it. That will surely help, and anyway it can't hurt.

4. Iterate. I mean, just apply this principle every time you face this uncertain non-understanding situation. (And you don't even need to add 1 to the iterator :) )

5. Ask specific questions. I forgot an important one! Comment your (specific) doubt in the community. How many times I was stuck and someone here in the community helped me have that 'aha' moment? I literally have lost the count.

I sincerely hope those help you (or anyone else in the same situation). Feel free to follow up or make any other (specific) question, so hopefully we can help you.

I have to say that Guil generally teaches pretty good. Not saying that this isn't good, but it is THE most confusing lesson I have ever seen trying to explain the arrow function. Now I consider myself an intermediate level JavaScript student. I actually understand arrow functions pretty well already. I was doing this course as a refresher for myself.

This lesson is unnecessarily complicated for explaining arrow functions to someone who has never used them before. I would advise any newcomer to go to Youtube and search for a video on JavaScript arrow functions. Probably any video will be more helpful than this one...

Other than that I think Guil's style of teaching is very good on average. This particular lesson a miss...

Guil is my favourite treehouse instructor, and I feel I have a good understanding of javascript, consider myself intermediate, but the syntax for this tutorial seems a bit advanced and can be overwhelming.

I feel it would be easier to understand had we used/created an object constructor instead of passing an object as a parameter to a function. Just saying that sounds like a mouthful LOL.

Having said that, I'm not sure if using an object constructor instead would alter the results of what Guil is trying to teach?

your not the only one at times i feel lost

I feel like Guil is using too much stuff that I don't know yet.

It's like having a Spanish teacher trying to teach you a new word. But instead of using the new word in a sentence with words you already know the teacher just speaks 10 words which you have never learned yet. How am I supposed to even...?

I have days where I can run through 60 tasks on treehouse and then there is those days where I watch 2 videos and spend 4-6 hours figuring out what the f*** those other 9 words are so that I can understand the sentence.

Heh heh... thanks for the comment. I am not alone.

i concur.....