I'm not a CS teacher, but I answer lots of questions from novices on StackOverflow, so I often feel like one. And of course we see lots of repeats of the same beginner mistakes (e.g. initializing a variable that's supposed to accumulate results each time through a loop rather than before the loop). I wish I understood why these happen, what's going through their minds when they write this and why the correct solution isn't obvious to them. It's not really about the teaching process, but I expect that teachers who work closely with students would have some insight (I've occasionally tried asking the person who posted the question, they can never explain their thinking, it's always "I'm a beginner, I don't know what I'm doing.").
So would a question about that, just to learn something from experienced educators, be acceptable at the main site?
I've posted my sample question in the Sandbox