The Teaching

I love teaching. I really do.

In my cubicle, I have four pictures of people. There’s a photo of me hugging my wife. Her long hair hangs in streams across her face and we both have huge, happy smiles. I have a pair of photos of two pilots I admire, Charles Lindbergh, standing next to his Spirit of St. Louis, and Amelia Earhart.

The last photo is of a writer I admire, who was also a teacher. His last book, in fact, was called Teacher Man. Francis “Frank” McCourt is probably best known for his Angela’s Ashes and less so for ‘Tis. But to me, he was first a teacher.

There is something wonderful to me in the act of imparting knowledge to someone. Teaching. People come in the room and sit down and an hour or so later they leave and they look the same, but they’re different. They walk out of the room carrying some new morsel of wisdom they didn’t have when they walked in.

I love what I call the Lightbulb Moment. In cartoons, when they need to indicate that someone has just had an idea, they illustrate this by putting a lit lightbulb above the head of the thinker. There occasionally is a moment when you can see in someone’s face that Now, They Get It! Maybe one time out of a dozen it happens but when it does, it’s all worth it, for me.

I have been a teacher all my life. I can remember showing neighbor kids how to ride a bike. I can remember showing classmates how to color. In High School I made gas money by giving guitar lessons in peoples’ homes. I’d walk in and sit with you and your guitar and point out a different voicing of a chord or some new technique and answer a few questions and then leave with a few extra bucks, but leaving that knowledge behind.

I taught people how to Write. On the old GEnie network, I helped people with query letters, plot outlines, or suggested markets they might sell their stories to. Shortly after this, I started teaching people how to use GEnie, itself. They learned how to read their e-mail and how to download files and how to participate in online conversations. I have been teaching people how to go online and get things done since 1987.

I taught aviation ground school, after a fashion. It was online, in the Aviation Forum of The Microsoft Network. Someone would post a question about the regulations that were in effect at the time, or mention they were having trouble perfecting their short-field landing technique or something like that. We’d work it out. And people would come back and announce they had soloed or they had received their Private Pilot certificate at long last and we all would celebrate, because we all had a part in it.

And so today, there are people out there enjoying making music, being paid to write or just enjoying the writing process, spending time online and even flying airplanes, in some small part because of something that I said or did or wrote. That’s a really great feeling.

I used to complain because of the temporary nature of so much of technology. Those Intel commercials aside, nobody much celebrates the folks who brought us the 3½″ floppy disc, any more. Or the old ZMODEM file transfer protocol. When was the last time you marveled at the efficiency of your local bank-in-a-box ATM? Someone wrote the code for that. Someone stressed about it. Someone wondered half-way through it all if it wouldn't have been better to do that routine this way instead of that way, and even though it meant tearing out a week’s worth of code, they did it—knowing that not one person in a hundred would know or care. They did it because it was the Right Thing.

I used to complain because my first Web page is gone, now. It doesn’t even exist on the WayBack Machine at the Internet archive. In fact, the first couple hundred Web pages I built are gone, now. I used to think if I had it to do all over again I’d come back as an Architect. How cool would it be to drive by an entire building, maybe one that people recognized, one that defined a city skyline, and know that it was once just an idea of yours? That has to be a really satisfying feeling.

But then I realized that I have that, here and now. Saturday mornings, in the summer of 1995, Molly Holzschlag sat with us on the other end of a modem and taught us all HTML. I have asked Molly before, “How many seeds are in an apple? And how many apples are in a seed?” The fruit, pardon the expression, of her labors fifteen years ago is still renewing itself. Three or four times a month, I teach an introductory HTML class. Three or four times a month, I teach a more advanced version. The same goes for Dreamweaver, and so on. And those people wander out of the classroom a little better prepared to handle the challenges of their jobs. And some of them, I know, have already taught others. And so from Molly, though me to them, to others... it continues.

I don’t know what you did, today. But I taught someone something. And you’re right: It’s a great feeling.