Monday, April 01, 2002
Oh Captain, My Captain!
I hate teaching.
I spent some time preparing my basic lesson. Went through several learning html texts, and stuck to the dozen or so most important tags to teach. I got a little overambitous and wrote a little css tutorial if things went well. I created a ficticous company website to use as an example that we could pick its code apart. I thought I was ready.
I was wrong.
It was about ten minutes into the class that I knew I was in trouble. Half the class looked at me with furrowed brows. Even the professor seemed overwhelmed with the amount of information I was trying to convey. Looking at the proxima image of the source code, even I was becoming intimidated. It was like suddenly I had become the high school teacher from Ferris Bueller's Day Off
except a million times worse; he didn't know how he was droning on, and I did. I felt I had become the professor from my Dinosaurs and Disasters in an Evolving Earth class (don't be fooled by the name, as I was - it's a geology class).
Anyway, Professor Schicciantano luckily stepped in and asked to do a few examples in Notepad, which I walked the class through, and things suddenly seemed to be made clear to them. I think most of them understood what I doing, at least in general, if not specifics. And after the class one guy shook my hand and thanked me. Apparently he wasn't even in the class - he was just in the lab but decided my lesson was more important than whatever he had been doing.
I love teaching.
------------------------------------------------