[arkano]

>I pretty much never learned anything of note directly from a teacher.

I've learned things after being corrected by a teacher, and then I practised on my own until the next mistake, at which point I was corrected again, and so on. It's this interaction that I find valuable, not just stating facts on a blackboard. As I have taught mathematics myself at the university level, I find that students don't really need me to read them the facts, I was more there to align their understanding.

As for consistency, I meant that you won't get to cherry-pick the topics that you like when learning on your own (or solve the problem sets that you find simple), which is a natural thing to do by the way. If you have your own curriculum and you stick to it, that's great, but I have found that when I allowed students to pick their own problems for homework, they grew weaker in some areas and stronger in others. This also didn't give me enough signal on their understanding in general, which meant that it deprived them of useful feedback.

> but this notion of consistency is kind of funny to me when the same degree from different universities (sometimes even the same university just a few years apart with different professors) can mean completely different skill sets.

Absolutely! I didn't mean consistency in terms of pushing out duplicates of the same, but consistency in terms of attacking a variety of problems in some course, allowing you to become well-rounded in your understanding. Once you reach that level, you can fill in the gaps and be comparable to a colleague that maybe had a slightly different curriculum.

[pingyong]

>I've learned things after being corrected by a teacher, and then I practised on my own until the next mistake, at which point I was corrected again, and so on.

Yeah, that actually makes sense. I suppose with programming (or anything CS related) I had this feedback loop much more readily available in forums, IRC or Stackoverflow etc. so I never really appreciated having this from a teacher. But outside of CS topics it might not be that easy.

[mattkrause]

Programming is also special in that you get quick, objective feedback from the compiler and tests themselves.

That's a lot harder to get in many fields.