My New Side-Career Path

How About a New Adventure!

My inner voice: "Those that can, do. Those that can't, teach."

Me to my inner voice: "Fuck off. Seriously. Here's a big can of fuck you."

Inner voice: "Oh good, students love profanity, you'll be a big hit with the staff at the college."

So, about a month or so ago, a young woman calls me and, as so many recruiters do, says

"Hello Mr. Nistuk, I'm <name> from <college name> International College, and I was wondering if you would like to apply for the position of iOS Instructor at our college?"

I shut down and then ignored my inner voice, and as I often do when offered a chance at a new employment adventure, said

"Yeah, OK."

A few interviews later, some shock from the college director at how much money I wanted to do the job, and promises extracted from my references ("please don't tell them how much I dislike young people!") I was the proud(0) owner of a new title that I had done nothing to earn:

Part Time C, Objective-C, Swift, iOS Instructor

Sweet!

The interviews were nice. The interviewers are genuinely nice people. They had questions like:

"How would you handle a student who just wasn't getting some concept you were teaching in class?"

Once again, ignoring my inner voice, I gave them an answer that they liked: "Well, I wouldn't allow this to slow the class down and help the student after class."(1)

"How would you deal with students who were always late or missing class?"

SHUT UP INNER VOICE!!!  "Well, I would impress them that learning to code isn't easy, and I'm here to help. Besides, quizzes, right? You only hand out quizzes at the start of the class! That will really bring them in at 9am! No one wants to miss a quiz.. These are liberal arts types, right? They're never late..."(1)

That should have disqualified me. But I suspect the college is seriously desperate.

When I can help them hire people for future s/w development instructor, I shall endeavour to make sure that people as woefully underqualified as myself will not be hired. That shall be my penance for somehow tricking these really good people for hiring me...

My First Two Weeks

For the first two weeks of my four hours a day at work, I had the great fortune to be able to sit with the existing S/W Dev Instructor and use him as a resource as I developed my course plan. He gave me a lot of great tips, that helped me develop my course plan, choose books for the class, and prepare for the characters who would be taking my class.

Sadly, I ignored a bit of his advice: choose books that come with teaching aids, like slides. For the C section of the course I chose the venerable "The C Programming Language - 2ed" by Kerninghan & Ritchie. You can't go wrong with that one! It's a classic!

OK, so I have no teaching aids, no problem... I'll make my own. For the first two weeks of half days, I make fire up Google drive and fire out the class plan for the C section of the course. IT TOOK ME TWO WEEKS OF FOUR HOUR DAYS TO CREATE A ONE WEEK CLASS PLAN!!

I would read through K&R think about the chapter, and try to put

Ok, that's a lie. I got three days completely done...

Teaching is hard, and I haven't even started teaching!

The weekend before the class rolls around, I decide to take a break and watch some more WWDC 2015 videos... I notice that they use Keynote presentations - black with white text. Lots of whitespace, short sentences on each slide. Mostly talking to the audience...

I buy Keynote and quickly rewrite the course plan. Ok, the course plan for *one* of the days.




      
(0) "proud"? Try... freaked out... 
(1) This turns out, oddly enough, to be as far from a realistic approach as something that is as far as you can get from something else. Yeah, I'm not good at similes.