Writing code out by hand

I started teaching myself programming and I fucking love it.. So I decided well I might aswell take a course at university so that I have a really strong foundation to build on myself. It's such bullshit. They keep taking points off my assignment and giving me comments like "recursion hasn't been covered in class yet". SO fucking what? Now they want me to write an exam and write my code out by hand? Is that even possible? Are there ever any 'real world' scenarios where you would ever need to do that?

>>1
Maybe because no one uses recursion in the real world.  You're aren't just writing code for you to understand, other people have to waddle through your shit and if it was me the last thing I would want to see is recursion.

>>18
A lot of problems are much easily explained and written recursively than having to transform it into an iterative version. If someone is too stupid to understand some simple recursion, maybe they shouldn't be programming at all?