This is a post about CS education. It is prompted by a seriesofposts by Mark Guzdial in which he criticizes the pervasive belief among CS educators that when it comes to programming, there’s not much an instructor can do: some students get it, others don’t; it’s all in genetics or other external factors that CS educators can’t influence (aka the Geek Gene Hypothesis). I am with Mark on this, but I feel a bit stronger about it than he does. I think that attitude is bullshit, and the studies supporting it are unsound by means of making conjectures ignoring an enormous number of confounding factors. Cristina (Crista) Videira Lopes
A lot of it is not even teaching method, it is attitude. When CS was “professionalized” in the 1970s, all the stupid gatekeeper ambitions and pointless competition from the traditional “hard sciences” and engineering were imported. When I taught intro CS, I found that the most important part of my 
job was sustaining the morale of the students who came in without programming background (and many bad ideas).
Harvey Mudd, as Vidiera points out, has actually tried to address these problems and
Our instructors had private conversations with students who were using up a disproportionate amount of air time in class talking about arcane details and asked them to have those conversations with the instructors in private because other students found their level of knowledge intimidating. [US News]
Not being as nice, smart, or hardworking as the people as Harvey Mudd, I used to just tell those students to shut up and learn something in my class. And I spent a lot of time telling other students not to worry, that the “experts” didn’t actually know anything near what they thought they did. The common attitude among CS teachers, who are generally former arcane-air-time students themselves, is quite different.