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Archive for the ‘things we should teach’ Category
Good Teacher
March 7th, 2010
I was a teacher, once, for a year, at a high school where I learned that:
- There are students who will succeed no matter what you do, how you teach, or how hard you work.
- There are students who will fail no matter what you do, how you teach, or how hard you work.
- These two facts do not let you off the hook, but they will make you feel pretty stupid when you forget them.
- Being a good [subject] teacher, does not necessarily produce students that are good at [subject].
In my case, teaching Interactive Game Design for 11th and 12th graders, you’d think that being a good teacher would produce good game designers. That makes sense, right? That’s what I was being paid to do…right? No. That’s stupid and too simple.
Honestly, we shouldn’t be aiming for that anyway.
It’d be nice to be able to throw this template down on every student and just say, “This is how we do it. This is what I’m teaching, this is how you will learn it, and this is where this class leaves off and another begins. By the time you have had n classes, you will know what I know.” But that, too, is too stupid and too simple. College can work that way, but high school can’t. Or shouldn’t, rather.
What a teacher has to swallow is much more complicated, and honestly, much more humbling. You see, for a handful of students, the teacher is completely irrelevant (academically). I was irrelevant. The school could have run tapes of Dora the Explorer all day and these students would have still been good students. They still would have had that hustle that others admire, and they would have understood Dora better than their peers come graduation day.
On the opposite end, no amount of personal attention, one-on-one tutorials, extra time, extra homework, verbal, written, or visual lessons was going to help that handful of students who refused to let it help them. Nothing was going to change that. For them, I was irrelevant too, just a different kind of irrelevant. An irritating itch they could do without.
The problem is in the expectations: I teach X. Students learn X. Eventually they will do X for a living.
The model is wrong. What we should be doing is getting the hell out of the way. Why do we keep telling our students what to be good at? Do we think they don’t already want to be good at something for themselves?
The truth is, students want to be good at something, 99% of them CAN be good at something, and good teachers let them. That’s what we should be taught to do, and that’s a lesson my students taught me.
Say Something Original
January 15th, 2010
And here’s the trick: Take all of your first reactions — all of them — and don’t let them come out of your mouth.
Your replies, your first thoughts, your first facial expressions. None of them are original. They’re too ingrained. They’re expected now. Stop doing them.
That small thing, the act of shutting the hell up, forces you to have another thought. It may not be any good, but that’s not the point. One day they’ll be good. With practice we get better.
This is my advice to me, but you’re welcome to listen if you like. This should have been a resolution for 2010, but I probably said something rote instead.
Dispelling the Launch Myth
September 24th, 2009
I’m just going to lay it down in small words: “If you build it, they will come,” is a crock of shit.
To borrow a phrase, if I had a nickle for every time a website launch was delayed on account of the imperfections…
As a web programmer, I see a lot of projects come and go. We depend on the project manager’s ability to say, “We could spend more time polishing and adding features, but let’s get this in front of some eyes,” which is a hard thing to say, I’ll admit, because there are 10,000 things that could be better. If you happen to be the project manager, then that burden is on you.
And what makes it even harder is this strange voice in your head that says, in no uncertain terms, that as soon as you upload those files, all the world’s web traffic is going to come crashing down on your web server. We start to believe that Google will index those pages in their first five minutes of life rather than the week(s) we know it takes for everyone else’s sites to be crawled. We start to picture the angry emails about god-knows-what wrecking havoc in someone’s personal life because there are two instances where someone’s name is spelled wrong. What could be worse?
Yeah, but that’s not how it works. Uploading some files will probably not register with many people at all. In fact, it’s really anticlimactic when you’ve been cranking out an app or site for weeks and then the moment of truth…is quiet.
I know it’s really hard to picture a world where no one is paying attention to you, but don’t be fooled. That place is real and it’s called the Internet. I’m not talking about your Twitter account or your Facebook page. I’m talking about your new site. Your new application.
There will always be a sea of reasons to wait on a launch, and only one reason to go ahead and do it. (Hint: Progress.)
So you, programmer, in the back with the Redbull and Cheetos, I only have one thing to say to you: Quit being a pansy. It’s time to launch.