[This one from the drafts folder, folks. Reflections on the code bootcamp, week 3-ish out of 8. Written on the number 7 bus en route from class, most likely. My bus commute is at best two and at worst three hours every day. I had grand plans to maximize that time, but here it is week 6 and I’m still spending it mostly on phone games.]
stop teaching me things, I’m trying to learn
As a middle school teacher, I became attuned to “teachable moments,” opportunities to impart knowledge related or unrelated to the topic at hand in response to what is happening in the classroom. Sometimes these situations relate to “real world” knowledge, questions about current events, observations about how people interact with each other. “This wasn’t on my lesson plan, but this is a teachable moment and I need to take advantage of it while it’s here.” Genuine connections, stuff kids will remember.
My instructor and TA are great at taking advantage of these in class. When someone couldn’t connect their laptop to the overhead, we got a lesson in how to clone a repo in github. Unexpected errors get dissected until they’re solved. The answer to “who else has seen this error?” is usually not nil. Almost nothing is off the table, and I’m a better programmer for it.
It’s not always a picnic though. The structure of this class is a lot of stuff to get done in a short time frame. I’ve had multiple scenarios where I ask a question about how to implement something in my code, only to be steered towards doing it an entirely different way, often with huge structural implications. My impulse here is to respond with “Hell no, I’m almost done! That sounds like a great suggestion for another app. Let me just finish it my way and move on.” I’ve had to resist those feelings of impatience or frustration in order to leave myself open for what I’m thinking about as unsolicited learning. Those situations where I did *not* want a lesson, or not on some topic other than the one at play, but here is one anyway. It can be valuable if I stay open to it. Hell, I can even ignore it once received, as long as I get it.
It’s a blessing and a curse to be meta attuned to what’s happening with my own learning. And of course timing is everything. I may be open to one lesson at a given point and another one, I just want to go home and think about it and hash it out later. I’ve tried to convey this with as much respect and humility as possible while still being assertive– it’s my time, and I usually know what’s going to be productive for me and when the only solution to hitting a wall is to step away from it and come back later. That conversation looks something like this: “I see what you’re saying. This code could be definitely be refactored. I don’t know enough about this particular function and I’m not in the headspace to dig into it now, so I’d like to table this to research and work on later. I’m confident I have what I need to solve this now.”
It’s all a process.
Leave a Reply