Wow time sure does fly when you are busy and having fun. So I have learned a lot over the last month. Even as an educator your never above learning. In fact there will be times that you will learn something from a student you are teaching. In my younger days I used to teach Sunday school, and thinking back on that now I do remember how much I enjoyed it. My favorite part of teaching any age group is seeing the light bulbs go off. Knowing that I was a part of that. What I have learned the most over the last month is that in preping for my classes I have given myself some lightbulb moments. Times where I was like wait…. is that really all I needed to do? Why was this so hard the last time? It’s not that the material I have now is better than what I had before it’s just that I am looking at it from a different angle.
They say that there is always more than one side to a story and that is always true, but guess what? There is more than 1 side to nearly everything. Needing to make sure that what I am going to teach my students is in a format that they understand is one thing but trying to remember the questions and feelings I had so I can be ready for them myself is a whole different thing.
Before this week I had a lot of imposter syndrome going on. Sure HTML and CSS I got those down, been doing that for over 10 years now. JS and jQuery? Ok less years on that but I can look at a function or peice of code and explain what it is doing in most cases so not to scary. Python started this week though. Thats a newer language relatively speaking for me. Am I realy qualified to teach these students this? Some days I barely understand it myself? Turns out yes I am.
Granted I am sure I wouldn’t have been hired if I wasn’t but knowing that I need to know the material good enough to explain what is going on to students it actually helping me in the long run. This time I am not just following my instructor and getting the required assignments done, I am trying to inspire and educate others. I love being a Web Developer. When I started coding over 10 years ago it was just a means to an end, in terms of I didn’t like the way a page was looking and wanted more control over that. Over the years I have come to really enjoy coding and developing websites and applications.