Teach

Every so often, I consider giving up my job to become a teacher.

I enjoy teaching. I tutored for extra cash in college; I assistant-taught in grad school; I taught math at a business college before I landed my first programming gig.

I like building the lessons, I like coming up with new ways to explain and illustrate ideas, I like being in front of the class explaining and answering questions. I like that it sometimes forces me to consider my topic from unusual angles. Grading is tedious, but even that is scattered with occasional rewards. ("Parallelozoid" was the surprise gem of my grad school days.)

It's been my fallback plan for more than five years, if I were to lose my job -- there's always a shortage of qualified math and science teachers, and I have a master's degree. It wouldn't be too hard to get picked up by one of the local school systems with a qualification conditional. (That is, they'd hire me on condition that I meet the qualification requirements within a certain timeframe.) This isn't speculation; I actually looked into it at one point when I was particularly unhappy with my job.

It would, of course, cut my salary cleanly in half, and that's pretty much the only reason I haven't already done it. We could manage if that's what happened, but we'd have to budget a lot tighter, and some of our luxuries that we've grown used to would probably disappear.

So I was really thrilled last year when I got tapped to teach a process course for my company. Not just to the people in my office, but across the business unit. The slides I was given to teach from were pretty horrible, and I enjoyed the struggle to get them into shape. I liked teaching the class, and the feedback forms, when they eventually made their way to me, had some very nice comments and excellent suggestions.

Of course, having taught the course once, I am now apparently the go-to girl for it. When the training schedule came out in March, I was right there on it. It's extra work, but I was still happy.

I spent yesterday completely re-working the slides. From scratch. I pulled a few individual slides from the original presentation, and used it for reference so I wouldn't forget anything critical, but the experience of teaching from those slides showed me that they'd been beyond reform. I really like the new slide deck I've come up with; it's half as long and -- I think -- explains the core concepts much more clearly. It's less cluttered -- I'm doing less reading and more explaining, but it's all there in the notes section, for people who need to come back to it later. The biggest suggestions I got from last year's course were to involve the class participants more, and to provide more examples, and I think I did that.

In short, I've been having a blast. The class itself is next week, and I can't wait. Most of the trainers look on these courses as a chore, a necessary interruption of their "real" work, but for me, this is fun. The company doesn't have a dedicated teaching staff (our training staff concerns itself with scheduling, administration, and upkeep of the online training hooha), or I'd request a transfer. Too bad. At least I'll have this to look forward to every year.