Fortunately, I did encounter a few more teachers that left an impact on me. Yet, it wasn’t until my last year of high school that I even considered if I would enjoy teaching, and even then, I quickly shelved the idea. Law or Physics had my attention at the time, and I decided I wanted to “get out into the field” first. It wasn’t until I went to post-secondary and learned to code that I would find out I enjoyed teaching.
When you’re coding something, you’re essentially teaching a computer how to execute a task. Let’s consider tying some shoes. It seems like it would be simple to tell a computer how to tie shoes because it’s easy and we’ve done it so many times. But the computer hasn’t, nor does it know what laces are, or a knot, or even a shoe. You’ll need to break the task down into the most basic steps and then put those together in the most efficient way possible that a computer could understand.
This process helped me view the same task from many different angles. Through trial and error, I eventually grew better at understanding what I was trying to accomplish and how to arrive at that goal. I also noticed I was better at explaining myself to others and finding relevant examples from their interests to get the point across. For a gamer, I would use video game references. For an athlete, I’d use a sports analysis. The message would be the same, just the steps to get there would slightly differ. Suddenly I wanted to learn how everything worked, so I could have some reference to help others understand.