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November 4, 2015

Filed under: tech»education

Closing the textbook

Last week, when the administration sent out their quarterly "please someone cover these classes, we are very desparate" email, I put in my notice at Seattle Central College (how's that for irony?). I'll be finishing up this quarter teaching ITC 210, and then I'll need to find a new way to occupy 10-20 hours a week. For a start, I'm planning to volunteer for the local Girl Develop It organization as a TA. I'll be able to cook for Belle more often. And I'd like to be more active in managing the local Hacks/Hackers chapter that I took over earlier this year.

SCC does have some deep organizational problems, and I won't pretend they haven't influenced my decision to leave. But I don't regret the time I spent there: there's been little as rewarding as seeing people take the information I can give them and really run with it. Teaching has often pushed me to make sure that I knew every detail of a subject so that I wouldn't mislead students, and it's gotten me to explore new workflows and clarify my thinking on a lot of topics.

The most important thing I've learned isn't anything technical. Early on in my time as an instructor, I would often be surprised when students wouldn't know something basic, even though it might have been in the prerequisites (only later would I find out how porous those prereqs are at SCC). After a little while, I made a conscious decision that my reaction should be enthusiasm instead of surprise. Although I'm not a huge fan of XKCD, I was inspired by this comic:

Approaching ignorance not as a character flaw or personal failing, but as a chance to share something cool, was great for students. It provided a perspective from which basic questions can turn into an enthusiastic deep-dive into a topic — something even advanced students might find valuable. And it kept me engaged far longer than I think I could have managed in a curriculum where the opportunities to teach really high-level, interesting techniques just weren't there.

Although it seems a bit like pablum, and deeply out of character for a cynic like me, I actually believe that enthusiasm will continue to be useful, even when I'm not teaching regularly. After all, I work on the bleeding edge of an industry that's still struggling to figure out the Internet: the least I can do is be positive about it, for my sake if not for theirs.

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