Yearly Note 2018: Joys of Teaching
2018 was the year teaching stopped being a job I did and became the thing I was good at.
I ran a wide spread of courses: visual thinking, programming, tangible computing. The moment I remember best was in the visual thinking workshop, watching students build anamorphic artworks with no plan on paper, just correcting each other as they went. ReRide carried on in parallel, and I started moving its next iteration toward camera-based posture tracking.
Two ideas reshaped how I taught. Paul Graham's line that a programming language should feel like pencil and paper changed how I designed my programming courses, away from ceremony and toward something you just pick up and think with. And Dr. Naveen's insistence on prototyping kept proving itself in the room. A trip to Shimoga with foundation-year students made the same point in a different key: a lot of the real learning happens outside the classroom.
Working with Venkat on the first programming course in the series let me refine all of this, and I owe Naveen the chance to build that series at all. Set against 2016 and 2017, I could finally see myself developing as an educator, less anxious, more willing to experiment, better at meeting different students where they were.