Throughout all of the labs, exercises, and questions we've done in CS, I've realized that none of the exercises are particularly challenging in nature. All of the questions can be solved by applying a concept we learned in class or simply through logic. Their difficulty actually arise largely from a lack of understanding of what it is that the question is asking you to do. In the past when I've been told to read carefully, I've always shrugged it off considering it as a mistake only 'amateurs' can make. From partaking in the labs this semester, I've come to take the advice of reading carefully to heart. There were definitely more times than I'd like to admit where I just stared at a piece of instruction in a lab handout in perplexity, unable to decipher how I'm supposed to approach the problem without a piece of information, only to have my partner point out to me that a paragraph in the beginning of the lab already addressed the lack of that piece of information. I made my own life harder than it has to be.
In one of the exercises involving binary trees (when we were first introduced to trees), the exercise asked us to do some kind of recursion through a tree, and I was immediately overwhelmed having assumed that each mention of 'tree' in the exercise pointed to non-binary trees. Then a friend told me to read the beginning of the exercise, and of course, the exercise specified that we're only working with binary trees.
Reading technical material is different from reading a story. Whereas in a story, your eye recognizes different sentence structures and your brain can interpret the general meaning of passage without taking to heart the weight of each word, in technical readings, each word is crucial to the understanding of the text.
Lesson learned.
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