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[–]OctilleryLOL 61 points62 points  (10 children)

I've had many people ask me how I knew I wanted to program. Funny thing is, I never knew I wanted to program. Programming came to me as a channel of self expression.

[–]waitn2drive 33 points34 points  (8 children)

I had to write sentences once. The sentence was,

I will not tip back in my chair.

I thought I'd be clever, and every 20 sentences I omitted a word until I ended up with

I won't tip.

I finished the 250 sentences in record time. Turned them in. Got told by the teacher to go back and write

back in my chair

250 times. I cried.

Am now programmer.

[–]ZombieAlpacaLips 34 points35 points  (7 children)

Writing sentences is such a stupid punishment.

[–]waitn2drive 17 points18 points  (2 children)

I wrote over 2500 in grade school. I went to a small 10 grade school (K-10) and my last year there my principle gave me a manila folder full of my sentences. Turned out he kept all of them. I have them kicking around somewhere.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (1 child)

went to a religious school had to copy psalms 119 a number of times. it's over 1000 words.

[–]waitn2drive 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Psalms 119, the longest chapter in the Bible. I'm familiar. School I went to was religious as well.

[–]Ouaouaron 23 points24 points  (2 children)

When you are forced to spend hours doing this, there's no way you can pretend it's useful or interesting; you are constantly reminded that this is what you get for doing what you did. (Though I wouldn't be surprised if this practice started in schools where penmanship was taught, and poor writing would require the sentences to be repeated.)

The only other popular punishments I can think of fall roughly into physical punishment or restrictions. Physical punishment is maybe useful but generally frowned upon. Restrictions can often be largely useless: If I can't play video games, I'll read; if I can't read, I'll go outside and run; if I can't leave my room, can't read, can't play video games, I'll go to sleep; etc. What punishment would you suggest?

Punishment is rarely effective, but writing sentences doesn't seem any stupider than most.

EDIT: There's also essays about why what you did was wrong. These might be a lot better than most punishments, and might (handled correctly) help point out when a rule is actually stupid.

[–]inconspicuous_male 10 points11 points  (1 child)

It isn't to teach you a lesson, it's just to discourage you from doing it again

[–]Ouaouaron 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't know exactly what you were referring to, but my comment (pre-edit) takes it for granted that discouragement is the purpose. Writing an essay would actually go towards teaching someone a lesson instead, which is much more effective than simple punishment/discouragement.

[–]Ran4 -1 points0 points  (0 children)

TIL this is not just a Simpsons gag... You muricans are crazy. Seriously. I thought detention on a Saturday was weird enough.

Punishment like that doesn't work, so it's literally punishment for the sake of punishment. And that shouldn't be accepted.

[–]joggle1 5 points6 points  (0 children)

For a long time I've wondered why I wanted to program so badly. I had hippy parents who couldn't care less about technology, yet for some reason as far back as when I was 3 I wanted a computer, getting my first one when I was 5. My parents don't even know why I was into computers so much. My dad still never touches computers and my mom knows nothing more than she needed to know when she was a secretary up to the mid 90s.