Initially and honestly, I was a bit hesitant on pairing and thought that it would simply add more time and work to my workload. Typically, I like to do things on my own. However, after going thru a few pairing sessions, I am now a firm believer in pairing. I have learned a lot from the people that I paired with and it has been a great experience working with different people with different approaches to see how they think and how they differ from my approach. Also, in addition to gaining a lot of invaluable knowledge during these pairing sessions, I was able to apply them on the weekly challenges and became more efficient completing them, but more importantly, I truly believed that I learned a lot more by pairing with other people during the week.
The best part of pairing with others is to able to bounce off ideas and work thru the challenges together in a collaborative way. Given that we are all relatively new to Ruby and programming in general, a lot of the concepts are foreign to me so being able to talk thru the concepts and having the other person explain a concept that you don't fully quite understand makes the pairing session very beneficial. As one would say, "it's more fun struggling together than struggling by yourself".
The only frustrating thing that I experienced is that it's inevitable that you will pair with other students that seem to pick up the material much quicker and are more knowledgeable than you. As a result, sometimes, it's hard to keep up with the other person during a pairing session because he/she may be going too fast and you don't have time to assimulate the material. As a result, it can become overwhelming at time. However, having said that, being in this situation also makes me realize and motivate me to continue working towarding keeping pace and catching up. Although frustrating at times because you feel that you are catching up and somewhat behind, this feeling also personally helps to motivate me.
I read thru the feedbacks and there were not many surprises. I generally knew that there were certain areas that I needed to review and work on and that my understanding of certain concepts are not as good as they should be. However, in general, I think that the feedbacks were mostly positive and my strengths being a good collaborator/team player and having very good patience working with other people.
I thought that the feedback was helpful, but it was more of an affirmation of things that I generally realize that I needed to continue to work on. Overall, the feedback was helpful in the sense that it helped to motivate me to go back and review some additional materials that I did not get a chance to spend as much time as I previously should have.
In general, before any pairing session, my goal is to spend about an hour beforehand reviewing the challenge and thinking thru my approach. My goal is that before I head into a pairing session, I want to get a head start on the challenge and have some ideas/concepts to try during the pairing session, thereby making the 1 hour pair session more useful and productive.
I enjoy the process of writing feedback because I feel that we can all improve. When I get feedback whether they are positive or negative, I feel that I learn something about myself and can identify areas of improvement. In many ways, getting negative feedback can be turned into a positive because it helps to identify your deficiencies and motivates you to improve and get better in certain weak areas. If the feedbacks were all positive, then there is nothing to improve, but we all know that we have a lot to learn and improve especially at this early stage of learning to code and program.
I didn't have any difficulty writing feedback. I guess that the hardest part of writing feedback is trying to provide kind and actionable steps on negative feedbacks.
In the beginning, I was a little skeptical on pairing because I didn't think that I would learn and gain a lot from the experience. However, after going thru a few pairing sessions in the past several weeks, I have completely changed my tune and am now a firm believer in pairing. I feel that I can and have learned something new and different from every person that I have paired with, whether it is learning a different approach, learning style, adapting to a different personality, etc. Going forward, I am going to try to schedule in advance as many pairing sessions as I can throughout the week.