2010 - Experience a Technical Instructor
I have the passion to share knowledge. And I had always catch myself in this position over the years since I was young.
I remember a time a math teacher of mine asked me to explain how square roots worked for the class because people were not getting it the way she was explaining, while I was translating to my friends what she just taught was, but in a different way.
How it started
As I have said, it was just in my DNA, I love sharing knowledge, and I the kind of person who believes knowledge should be free and accessible for everyone.
During my current job at the time, I got really into open standards, HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3. I had the opportunity to experiment a lot with that and I really got good at it.
Sharing knowledge
With this new very cool things, I had created a presentation called "The new JS APIs", to demonstrate how javascript was starting to become very powerful with all the new file, audio, and video APIS.
I remember presenting it in a frontend group, and people got really impressed by the examples I had to share. That experience was memorable for me.
Opportunity meets preparation
During one of these meetings, I had heard of a iLearn, a school member of W3C, that offered several open standards courses. It got me very interested, and I decided to search more about it.
While searching, I saw they were looking for instructions for their HTML5 & CSS3 course, and I was very interested in the opportunity.
Then I applied. They asked me to do an experimental lesson about CSS box-model. Everything went really well, they liked what I had presented, but they didn't feel so comfortable letting me instruct people because of my age that the time, 19.
Writing courses
Although I got rejected to instruct classes, they really liked my profile, and they invited me to write a new JS course for them, for both JS core and JS APIS.
I accepted the challenged. During the next 3 months I worked on these 2 courses, and after that, I also had the change to revisit some of the other courses to improve them.
I had to define everything related to the courses. So I had to have slides, print material, what should be taught in each class, live examples and so on.
I was guided for a very experienced teacher, founder of the school, and he taught me so much, that I was glad to work there, every day I was expanding my skills.
I finally started instructing
After all this "preparation" period. I had the opportunity to start instructing students with these new courses.
As a preparation, I had instructed other instructors about the new courses I had planned. Basically an internal instructor.
In the beginning, I instructed only small classes, and as things started going well, and students started seeing me as an instructor, I started instructing larger and larger classes.
I still remember the first person who called me "teacher". What a fun experience.
Wrapping up
Everything about this journey of sharing knowledge taught me how grateful and important it is to me. I'm very glad someone gave me the opportunity to work on writing new courses and also had the time to teach me how to be a better instructor.
I use all these skills I was able to master until today, to serve better the people I want to help.
Regards,
Renan de Azevedo
Updated at 2020/09/17 00:10.