First official step into mentoring

Teaching front-end web development to students in the IT School "Web Development"

Posted over 1 year ago

Background with teaching

Going back some years, in high-school, instead of learning my study materials, I've been learning HTML & CSS, but my main curiosity at that point was photo manipulation & some graphic design; so I watched & learned from Deke McClelland, from his Total Training days, I believe it was Photoshop/Illustrator CS3. That's some time ago 😅 Those tutorial courses helped me set a good foundation in knowing both Photoshop and Illustrator.

Fast forward a few years, my curiosity with teaching and lecturing started along with my university studies in Denmark, around 2010 - 2011. One of our art & design professors needed someone to give the class an extra bump in knowledge in using both of the aforementioned applications, as to have a more smooth lecturing & teaching experience in some more abstract topics. And that's where I came in, and that's when my first teching experience started. This encouraged me to learn more, forced me to get better at my english, and start learning how to teach. These courses continued for roughly two semesters and they've been and invaluable experience that challenged me in more ways than I imagined.

As the years passed, my interest in the area of teching and mentoring kept increasing; culminating with a overly-ambitious project that I wanted to start, back in 2015-2016, a tutorial platform, specifically designed for the romanian audience.

This lead to learning Ruby on Rails, during my internship at that point with the amazing founders of House of Code. Unfortunately, I've been too ambitious with this project, it's scale being larger than what I could have done at that point (even with the knowledge I've gained from then until now, it would still be a difficult endeavour), from having a custom made application, handling both back-end and front-end with custom admin panel, course creation, video uploader & converter, tracking, achievements, marketing, content creations... I went way too far for only one person. Nevertheless, the knowledge that I gained during that time, the people that I met along the way, it's all been a roller coaster of a ride. After about one year in, I decided to pull the plug on the project; it was the right decision for that time. Rest in peace Tutoreel. Who knows, maybe another time 😊

After coming back to Romania, I've prepared and taught some short courses for some friends & aquaintances to give them a crash-course in front-end web development and starting from July of 2022, I've started teaching a full 5 month course with IT School. Finished up one class and currently teaching the other.

Web dev course

In the Web dev course, I'm teaching a class of 15 students the how to-s of web development.

Starting with the building blocks with HTML, going though styling in CSS, understanding interactions with JS and finishing up with putting them all together with React.

At the moment, I'm a third way in with the second class and it's been a an amazing ride. There have been so many challenges, some expected, other unexpected. Interesting questions that come from wildly different points of view that challenge the way I think about and explain something, others that force me to be either clearer or less abstract than the usual way of thinking, some topics that are best explained with a white/blackboard and drawings. Thinking about the various areas where each student needs more practice or learning, forcing me to also prepare custom reading lists of resources in order to better help is a great challenge onto it's own.

And last, but not least, one thing that I wanted to focus on in bits and pieces throughout the course, and with a dedicated hour later on is that we're all human. The IT field has created this image of itself where the only thing that matters is "eat, sleep, code, repeat". There's more to this field than being a good technical person and we should strive to improve our soft skills as well; be them communication, negotiation, transparency, learning or others.