Teaching is fun and I miss it. When I taught, I had this great sense of helping people that is really hard to describe until you teach someone. There is this real sense of pride in knowing that you helped someone acquire some skill that they didn’t have before they met you.
Most of this happened in a classroom for me. I learned a ton about how to approach teaching, but honestly, our secondary education system is awful. It’s all driven by money. They teach what the dollars tell them to. That is why I left. I could see the program that I was part of head in a direction that I didn’t agree with.
I’d like to teach again.
How do I want to approach this
I have a few ideas of how to approach this. After all, I’ve been thinking about this for years. But I think for now I would just like to use the Internet as my platform to produce teaching material. Tutorials, both written and video, and both here and elsewhere. Maybe a downloadable PDF or two. I might even have an ebook of some sort in me.
The Internet is the perfect platform for teaching. We have barely scratched the surface of what we can use the Internet for as far as learning/teaching is concerned. I would like to experiment with this. There are plenty of bootcamps, code schools, and similar options. But where are some of the experimental things that venture into new ways of learning? It’s worth noting that Code School is the best of any code school that I’ve seen. The way their system integrates learning and repetition into their screencast system is awesome.
The best thing about teaching is the learning. I wonder if I could pick things to learn by teaching and just start writing tutorials based on that? The problem with this is that I am teaching something I don’t know much about. This might work if it’s in small portions. Maybe something like the old Railscasts site. That might be fun.
Another option is to start a new site of just tutorials/learning materials. The downside to that is that I would have another site to maintain.
And yet another option would be to use something like YouTube to host some videos of learning materials.
Maybe it’s just as simple as a new section on this site.
The common core of all of these is that it’s some sort of publishing platform. If that’s the case, I’d like to own it. Putting my work on someone else’s platform is scary. Considering I have the skills to build my own system, I’d be stupid not to own the entire system.
At any rate, I have no idea will this end up. I do know that I would like to start small, and start branching out into technologies that are currently not being used.