017 Those who can, do teach

Posted on by jupago

Once upon a few-weeks-back time I attended a Codepen NYC Meetup…
Among the talks there was one by @aidanfeldman on what he’s learned teaching JavaScript, and invited the group to the Hacker Hours meetup, which I joined.

A few days later I got an email from them looking for volunteer teachers to join ScriptEd_, and so I applied. And so will be teaching how to build for the web to a group of high schoolers this fall.

This is scary awesome!

Mainly for three reasons:

1. I never had this when in High School.
Although I did have a keyboarding class where we would mostly debate if the PS2 would beat the Dreamcast while playing a Windows 95 speed-typing-spaceship-shooting-letters game. My real intro to making websites really started in my second semester of college. Somewhere in my archives there’s a cool-lookin’ Photoshop-to-table layout website I built on BBEdit.

2. If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough..
I’m glued to my computer everyday and every time I learn something new it is rarely from the same source. It can be while listening to The Web Ahead, or reading CSS Tricks, or good ol’ Stack Overflow. I don’t mean to go full Tim Berners-Lee, but having a curriculum, a structure, will help me get some of those fundamentals down and be able to explain them faster than the attention span of a teenager

3. My students will look at this blog someday and say “He is also not funny in writing“.

And last, if you live in or around New York City and would like to join the team here’s an awesome video to get you started!