For as long as I can remember, I knew that no matter what I ever did, I never wanted to be a teacher. Why? I have no clue.
Many people in my family have held the role of teacher. Ranging from my late grandmother who taught for her entire career, and even after she retired, my grandfather who taught college courses in Chemistry (a topic that still manages to escape me), to my aunt who started as an English teacher and worked her way up to currently being an amazing principal and periodically teaching college-level courses. Even my parents teach in their respective ways, as my mom periodically teaches classes in Church and my dad has been a basketball coach forever. It’s not a lack of respect either, as I hold the belief that teaching is one of the most important roles in a successful economy, and despite that fact somehow still manages to be the most underpaid and unappreciated role, at least here in America. All that to say, I have no idea where this lack of desire comes from, but it has existed for quite some time.
My first true experience, however, came my first semester in graduate school, when I found out that I would be the Graduate Teaching Assistant (and only TA) for Introduction to Computer Security for my advisor. I’m not 100% sure when the imposter syndrome hit, but when it did, it hit hard. This class is made up of mostly juniors, seniors, and graduate students, meaning that everyone was either my age or older. And while I did fine in the class when I took it myself, and I have been around security since forever, I just knew that the chances of people noticing that I didn’t know ish were everywhere. I was so sure that it would go bad and I’d be considered a bad TA and lose funding for school and the end of me was near, but then it wasn’t. Much to my surprise, not only was I pretty good but more so found a large amount of enjoyment in it.
While not delving into individual experiences, I quickly came to learn that teaching was something that I drew great pleasure from. Both times when I taught the course, it was filled with people who had a genuine interest in the course and the material, even though their experiences ranged from very, very beginner to some who I am sure are far more knowledgeable and skillful than me at this point. I was quick to realize though that whether or not I always knew the answer, it didn’t matter. Being able to answer questions quickly was cool at times, but it was the times where things just didn’t quite go as anticipated and the answers to questions were not quite as clear cut that truly challenged me, and made teaching the course fun. While I know I learned a ton of material in the course and had some great experiences (I can talk about that later, some pretty awesome stories), it was probably teaching the course again that truly helped me grasp the material.
Early on I was taught that the best way to learn any type of material is to try and teach it to someone else. You quickly learn what you don’t know if you are lacking in a specific area, and also grow much more comfortable while studying. (If you are interested in trying this, then I would suggest to take this a step further and try to explain it to someone who has very little knowledge and/or interest in the area. That challenge pushes you beyond what you might imagine.)
Most recently, I was granted the opportunity to teach a group of high schoolers mobile and web development. The goal: Help the group of 48 students build both an iOS application and a website for their overall project in the SEI program. The challenge: I had 5 sessions of about 2-3 hours each, and maybe a quarter of the students had any type of programming experience. The result: overwhelming success.
While I am uncertain what this means for me in the long term, what I can say is that teaching has transitioned from something that I dreaded to an experience that I have begun to look forward to.
