Your teacher never had it all figured out
When I was in school, there were two things I was 100% sure of—so certain that I never even questioned them: that my parents wouldn’t let me starve and that my teachers had it all figured out.
The second belief changed when I found myself on the other side of the classroom (as for the first one, I still believe my parents will never let me starve). The more I teach, the more I’m starting to think that being a teacher is the exact opposite of "having it all figured out."
I’ve never had any formal training in teaching methodologies. Should I? I was invited to teach because of my skills in journalism and web development, but shouldn’t I at least learn what works and what doesn’t when it comes to teaching others what I know?
Sure, I’ve been a web developer for almost seven years, and I’ll be teaching creative coding. I’m creative—that’s what I do for a living: I create beautiful, interactive data-driven projects for my readers. But wait... how do I teach that?
Every new school year, I sit down and try to empty my mind of everything I know about the topic. Is that even possible? Can you pretend you don’t know? Then I ask myself a simple question: What kind of course would I want to take if I knew nothing about this subject?
It's a question without an end. Every year, I try to incorporate what I learned from the previous class, and every year, I end up thinking I could have done better—that maybe I failed them in some way. I should’ve seen that this or that topic wasn’t as solid as I thought it was.
So now, as I finish uploading the new syllabus to the university’s internal system just three hours before the deadline, I can only think about how often I’ve told my students not to leave everything until the last minute. To stay organized. To manage their time better.
Then it hit me like a lightning bolt. I’m the naive one. Just like me, my teachers never had it all figured out. They probably finished their assignments five minutes before the deadline. I bet they even raced against the clock to publish grades on time.
And I bet they, too, ended the school year wondering if they did a good job. They just excelled at pretending they had it all figured out.