Honestly, it's hard to completely grok a concept until you have solved at least a couple or three problems about the topic, no matter how many examples or lines of pseudocode you have seen. I think that's his complain, and I have to agree with him. I also took a class some years ago that was purely theoretical and I didn't really learn much besides some general concepts.
I was actually referring to solving problems yourself in pseudocode on paper.
In any case, I'm happy with a computer science course that doesn't involve actual computer implementations, and it's not just because it drives home the point that they are different things, but also because you don't have to get bogged down in the practicalities of wrestling with a particular language or a particular toolchain.
