My goal for this year isn’t complicated but it is ambitious. But before I tell you what the goal is I want to tell you why I made this my goal at all.
First, I love teaching. I didn’t know that I did until I spent 5 years as a homeschooling stay-at-home-dad for my two kids. And it was so much fun. I loved figuring out what to teach next. How to teach basic things like spelling and counting and cursive take on whole dimensions when you are the only person responsible for your kids learning anything. The creative part of developing curriculum got me thinking and seeing how they responded to different types of lessons was an awesome experience for me.
I have learned that I love helping people. Not everyone. I only help those that want help helping themselves - there is nothing worse than folks that want a handout or for you to do it for them. How did I get to this? I spent a long time with the military overseas. At first, I tried to help everyone that I saw struggling. And too many times I supplied handouts, and was spurned for being nice while a guy. I contrast that to when I used to live in Grafenwoehr, Germany and there were lots of young moms who knew they wanted something better than DODEA schools for their kids but didn’t know anything about homeschooling. Helping those girls, because they were so young it felt like that is what they were, was time consuming but they were so worthy of being helped. They didn’t want a handout - they needed help to help themselves. Which led me to another epiphany: The best feeling in the world is helping someone that is trying really hard to help themselves and their family.
I like to code yet I’m no superstar coder. In fact, I, like lots of developers, feel like a complete imposter when I compare myself to what I see are more talented coders. And this seems comical the more I think about it. I been a developer in 4 public software companies. I have tons of certifications on AWS, Microsoft, Oracle, and Java technologies. I’ve personally hired over 75 developers and delivered products on 9 different software stacks. I’ve taught my 9 year old son how to code in Python yet I don’t know Python… very well. All that said, I guess I do know something about coding.
So to sum that up: I like to teach, I want to help people that help that want to help themselves, I like to code and I like to meet people. If you combine all those passions together you end up with this goal:
I will teach a coding class that I have created to 200 people in 2016 - in person.
And that might be a little odd. But a worthy thing.
Total as of 5/9/2016:
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January: 2 Delivered
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February: 15 Delivered
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March: 10 Delivered
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April: 20 Delivered
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May: 4 Delivered
So after a little addition, you end up realizing 51 Students have received instruction in classes I have developed this year. Do a little multiplication and you realize that 264 hours of teaching have been received by these worthy students.
How I am counting: Even if the class is more than 1 day, it only counts as 1 class. If someone attends more than one class from me during the year, they get counted as a student in each class.
#Classes I have developed: