I tried to teach programming to a group of kids for a few weeks, and here’s what I got

The title is self explanatory, in this article I will explain my experience about teaching. But let me start on why I did it in the first place. As a short intro, I did not came from any teaching department, I have zero teaching experience, and exactly no expectation on how its gonna work out. But I did have some experience on giving tech talks and seminars on various tech subject, but what I got from teaching kids, was totally different experience from teaching or delivering tech material to grown up audience.

First of all, it begins on my search on multiple Facebook pages for a quick side part-jobs, to fill time between the gap of my relocation from my old company to a new one. I found a gig for a position as a programming teacher, for a franchise of programming school that have just been established in Indonesia. Decided to apply for it, and 2 weeks later, I got a call.

The call is basically a short screening and overview of my CV, and introduction to the teaching program, and the supervisor told me to wait for the result via email. Few days later, I got the email to login to a platform for teacher training, completed it in a week, and proceeded to next step which is more complicated teacher training on each of their teaching program. Completed them in around 2 weeks, and I got my first class to teach.

The training itself is not that complicated. It basically formed by points and quizzes on what and what-not to do as a teacher, material needed to be teach, and different long-term program of the franchise as a target for the teacher to achieve.

After all that, I need to send a demo video of myself teaching a class, and submit it as part of the interview process. After around 5 steps of interview, and some introductory learning to promote the class to the real client, I finally got accepted as the teacher for the franchise program.

And here, my experience started.

I had totally zero expectation on what to do and what to expect about how the kids would react and receive my subjects, so there are times that I freaked out and very stressed on what will happen if I cannot delivered it correctly, or if there’s something wrong. I begin to create an over-highly expectation from them to my method of teaching in my imagination, and conclude that it would not be possible to deliver the materials correctly and effectively related with my lack of experience in teaching. I was feeling really down and stressed before started my first class.

And then the class start. I was assigned with 2 different session per week, each have their own student group and subjects. The first group consist of 6 different kids, ranged from 9–10 years old. The later consist of 2 kids only, but they’re both 7 and 8 years old. I was expecting that both class will be quite same in situation and in handling the environment, but I was so wrong. Both is really different.

The older group behave more maturely, following orders to mute microphone and turn on camera on meetings. They’re more obedient and speak up if they didn’t understand something. In contrast of that, the younger group seems more active on working on tasks, and very cheerful. Yet there are times that they run off the meeting, spamming chats, and abandoning the class entirely.

The difference between the groups gave more dynamic into my method of teaching. Without any experience in teaching, my first class was really boring and strict. Communicating with the kids is surprisingly hard, especially to get their attention into the materials. And it’s true that at first, I had to calibrate my methods to be more adaptable and fun, and after around 3 weeks of meeting, I started to form a visualization of each kids preferences in my method of teaching.

Some prefer me to use English instead of Bahasa. Some also like to be mentioned often, and some also like working with the tasks more, and started earlier that their friends, rather that to stop to hear the instruction first.

I tried to be more flexible and as friendly as possible to each of them, and create a bond to trust and respect by making the class situation as free as possible. I achieve this by allowing a question session, or any interruption, anytime they want. They can also use the chat and “raise a hand” feature anytime they wanted, but with one condition, it has to be with a purpose, and not interruption any of their classmates or teacher.

This method proven works best if delivered before the lesson started, and iterated on every beginning of the class, to create the best environment for them to learn the subjects.

All and all, the class for 3 weeks runs smoothly with minor issues on connection problem, or kids avoiding tasks by running around while in a meeting. I ended up feeling grateful that I got the chance, and started to regret my imagination about the over-expectation, and why I’m stressed in the first place.

Unfortunately, condition forces me to withdraw as a teacher, and continue with my new company role as Fullstack Programmer. But the experience of teaching, surely left a great impact on my view on delivering messages and subjects to other people. From my experience, I conclude that, if you could teach a child how to learn complicated things, like programming, you are ready to teach for broader and older audiences. Because to teach a child, you need to understand a subject, create a summary of it, and explain it with simpler terms and as effective as possible, which this requires a great mastery of the subjects, and broader experience on how to compact down the material, into better and understandable form.