Morning Commute

For the past two days I have commuted towards the southern reaches of London to teach a group of business people how to use a technology product I happen to know more than most about. It has been my first experience of teaching a group, and somewhat unnerving. I am not a teacher.

Somehow in my head I imagined standing in front of perhaps four or five people. Having signed into the building and followed a rabbit warren of corridors, I was greeted by a rather large room – full of people. I put on my ad-hoc teacher’s hat, consigned any natural shyness to my backpack, waved in a friendly manner to everybody and started acting.

I don’t know how to teach. Everybody who has seen the way I am with children always remarks how good a teacher I would have made – but this was a room full of grown ups. Luckily I have sat in a good few training courses over the years, so did what I’ve seen other people do.

We went around the room doing introductions, I wrote names down in high speed scribble (I even draw a diagram of where they were sitting – I saw another teacher do that on a course I was in once, and thought “that’s a damn good idea – I’ll do that one day”). Of course I only referred to one person by name during the two days, and I got it wrong.

Everybody knew my name.

Whenever I’m showing professional people anything vaguely technological, I’m always scared stiff of being found out – scared that some classroom know-it-all will know more than me about the thing I’m demonstrating, or discussing. I’ve never actually had it happen, so I’m guessing it’s another hang-up to put on the pile that make me who I am.

Of course, computers being computers, I always fear that things will not work too. When showing something to a group of people who are paying a lot of money for you to show them that something, strange things happen. The button you’ve clicked on five thousand times before doesn’t do what it did the previous five thousand times.

During the first day I stressed over absolutely everything. To the class I probably appeared calm, methodical, and knowledgeable. Unbeknown to them, my heart was in my mouth most of the time. It’s surprising how quickly you relax though – today (day two) was an altogether more relaxed affair. Part of the reason for that was down to me proving everything I wanted to do would work late the night before. Yes, I am that mad.

So, while I might appear to be a good teacher and might appear composed and clever, I don’t think I could do it as a career. I can almost guarantee that at some stage I would lose it (prompted by my own perceived failure to figure something out in front of the students). I would be found hours later in the street, talking to pigeons about strong naming in the dot net framework or something.