Another wrong turn, much earlier in my career. I worked as an employee doing software development consulting work for a consulting company. The company wanted to train in other consultants to do OS/2 software development, since at the time there was a big demand for OS/2 developers.
Since I had just done a big single-developer job with ISDN integration on OS/2 platform in C++, they asked me to train in other co-worker consultants at the company.
I naïvely thought, "Sure, sounds like fun!" Hoo-boy, I didn't realize that I had jumped into the deep end of a cold pool. I had a week to prepare.
What I came to appreciate is:
teaching is a skill, and I have zero experience in that skill
preparing a curriculum is a huge undertaking
teaching a subject needs to be laid out and presented such that it is a logical progression, so the students can consume and digest the information
people can be categorized by the way that they learn; not everyone learns in the same one way (I learn by following along with tutorial books, and futzing around, and branching out to do other things extrapolating from what I had learned)
trying to teach "How to program in OS/2" using C++, to a class of smart consultants who do not know C++ and have no programming experience on personal computers is not a recipe for success
Fortunately, that wrong turn gave me a bitter taste of my own limitations. I'm good at one-on-one mentoring, I'm not good at classroom teaching.
Alas, I regret having floundered in front of my co-workers, and burning a week of their time and two weeks of my time. The embarrassment still stings.
Please don’t be too hard on yourself. Teaching is a job in itself. One-on-one tutoring and classroom teaching are almost polar opposites. It baffles me how companies think they can use one employee to teach others without providing any (teaching) materials or support (prior training in teaching for example) and think that everything will go smoothly.
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Another wrong turn, much earlier in my career. I worked as an employee doing software development consulting work for a consulting company. The company wanted to train in other consultants to do OS/2 software development, since at the time there was a big demand for OS/2 developers.
Since I had just done a big single-developer job with ISDN integration on OS/2 platform in C++, they asked me to train in other co-worker consultants at the company.
I naïvely thought, "Sure, sounds like fun!" Hoo-boy, I didn't realize that I had jumped into the deep end of a cold pool. I had a week to prepare.
What I came to appreciate is:
Fortunately, that wrong turn gave me a bitter taste of my own limitations. I'm good at one-on-one mentoring, I'm not good at classroom teaching.
Alas, I regret having floundered in front of my co-workers, and burning a week of their time and two weeks of my time. The embarrassment still stings.
Please don’t be too hard on yourself. Teaching is a job in itself. One-on-one tutoring and classroom teaching are almost polar opposites. It baffles me how companies think they can use one employee to teach others without providing any (teaching) materials or support (prior training in teaching for example) and think that everything will go smoothly.