Why Engineers Should Teach

As an experienced engineer, learning to teach has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, and not necessarily in the ways that I would have expected. Even things that I expected felt surprising when experienced first-hand.

I expected the challenge of preparing a lecture and trying to be a good teacher. When we were younger and uncertain of our interests, good and bad teachers had the potential to dramatically change our feelings about a subject. My greatest fear was delivering a lecture that was unclear, trivial, or — worst of all — boring.

Someone told me recently that “the Earth is made of rocks, and the world is made of stories.” Storytelling is one of the most powerful things in the world, and I wanted to tell a great story, albeit a technical one. A lecture can educate, but a story can inspire. I wanted to ignite curiosity about engineering, demystify, and reduce any feelings of intimidation.

When I think about the story of a class, the first thing I think about is the “empowerment promise”. We ask students to spend their limited time with us, and they should be inspired by what they’ll be able to build by the end of the course.

For example, in a web development course, I start by opening a dozen different websites that they might use regularly, like Amazon, Reddit, YouTube, etc. If we were to deconstruct each of those websites into use cases, we’d see mostly common themes between them. We would see that there are common layouts — a header/footer, side/top navigation, one or two columns, scrollable regions, and expandable items. We can identify use cases like logging in, hovering on a navigation bar, adding an item to a cart, liking/commenting, and auto-completing search. If you’re a web developer, you know that the list of use cases for the average website is pretty finite.?

The first part of the empowerment promise is, if the students follow along each week, they will be able to build basic, functional versions of those websites by the end of the course. The second part of the empowerment promise is, if they imagine any startup or website they might want to build, those websites can probably also be built from the same set of use cases. Imagine having the skill to build any website that you can imagine! It’s helpful to check in each week, and review how much more of YouTube or Reddit they can now build. It works as a map or progress bar as they’re making their way through the topics of the class.

The first lecture that I gave was probably pretty mediocre. Through a lot of iteration, I’ve become a better storyteller, more comfortable with public speaking, and greatly expanded my toolbox of teaching practices. Many teachers who coached me along the way taught me about ABCCBV, the three E’s, Turn-Pair-Share, chat waterfalls, “I do, we do, you do”, and lots more. I also learned that teachers love acronyms!

Most of the engineers that teach with us have never formally taught before, so we offer teacher training, and support during your class. See the screenshot below for some of the topics that we cover in the teacher training.

Over the years, I witnessed the impact of our courses on the careers of students that I got to know well, experienced the gratitude of many students (and the occasional parent!), and grew my own technical mastery. There are many things in engineering that I accept as truth or best practice. Being asked every imaginable question and having to explain things from first principles forced me to deepen my own understanding.

There were things that surprised me as well. My years in industry have seasoned me, but they’ve also hardened me in ways that are bad. I was more easily worn out, less curious, less open. I got to interact and form relationships with college students who are all potential, infinitely curious and energetic, hopeful for their future and the impact that they’ll have. Their youth felt infectious, and it gave me more energy and excitement about my own future.

I was surprised by how fulfilled I was by the connections I made with students, both the brief ones that lasted the duration of the class, as well as the ones that I kept in touch with for years afterward. I am a happy introvert, and in the years before I taught, I was content to be with family and close friends. I didn’t feel the need to meet new people, and certainly not through small talk at some event. Through my years of teaching at CodePath, I’ve had the opportunity to meet thousands of different, creative, skilled people from a huge range of backgrounds, and be a small part of their learning journey.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, we at CodePath are always looking for engineers to teach our evening/weekend courses that run in the summer, fall, and spring. We also need full-stack, Node/React web developers to teach our summer immersion program, so if you can take a summer sabbatical for 10 weeks, that’s a really fun program to teach. You can apply for the summer instructor position here.