Some thoughts on my experience as a teacher

LuisPa García

tl;dr

Teaching is exhausting, unfulfilling and requires to being around young people. Which is not something I particularly enjoy. Today more than ever, I really admire people that enjoy to teach, I guess this is not for me.

Some thoughts on my experience as a teacher

For the last 4 weeks I have been the teacher/coach of ~10 people for about 6 hours a week, mostly about some dev/coding/infra stuff.

I already heard in the past the phrase "You explain the things very clear, you should be a teacher", but I really never believe in that as a real thing.

Now, I learned that even if you have a lot of knowledge about some topics, prepare some curriculum and a learning path, and use clear and easy words to explain things... that is not enough to be a good teacher.

But hey... don't get me wrong, It was a great experience. The feedback was really positive and the crowd was happy (or at least they told me that in the surveys). At least I learned what things I found cool to teach, and what things are difficult express from my deep self.

In short, here's a compilation of thoughts I have on teaching:

  • Planification is key, but painful. Requires time, preparation, taking risks, and a lot of focus.
  • The material must be interactive, or the crowd will get bored.
  • Even if you receive positive feedback from your crowd, sometimes I felt this sense of unfulfilling frequently.
  • On learning stuff not all the people start from the same starting point, finding a good middle ground is not easy or clear.
  • Is extremely easy to lost the attention/focus of the crowd to your content, being there as a student...
  • Is exhausting. Yes. Today more than ever, I really admire people that enjoy to teach
  • Felt unfulfilling frequently.
  • Enjoyed the process but not the effects, always found a ton of "things to improve" after giving the content.

The last thing I made today was asking for help to a young veteran teacher, on how to handle this kind of senses, let's see how it goes.

Maybe I'll write another post later if I jump in some conclusions, but at this point and based in my current sense of joy, I believe this will be my last experience as teacher lol.

Let see how it goes, thanks for reading.

Happy coding.