davdev

The main reason I left is to be quite honest, I don’t think I was very good at it. I am fairly good at picking up things quickly and at times couldn’t really understand why some of the kids were having problems. I know this was a failure on my part. There were some topics and concepts I think I was very good at explaining and others I really wasn’t.

I taught a Computer Tech class in a vocational school which meant I was with the same kids for 30 hours a week every other week. These same kids were in that program for 4 years. So there is a huge amount of time to fill. My department was myself and another teacher, and between us we had to teach Hardware and Operating Systems, Networking, telecom, some HTML and python programming, basic photoshop and audio editing and a few other things. Frankly my knowledge base wasn’t that large. I was fine with the Hardware/OS stuff but a lot of the other stuff I was learning myself the night before doing a lesson. It was stressing me out and wasn’t really fair to the kids.

That department had also been rotating through teachers every 2-3 years so it was always 2 relatively new teachers trying to figure out what the fuck they were doing with little to no support. For instance when I started my senior instructor was in his second year and frankly he was amongst the worse teachers I could ever imagine. Through all my shortcomings I still put in a ton of effort. He did nothing. So I had no one to lean on. Then he left, and that made me the senior instructor. I was in no way ready for that.

Ultimately I lasted three years. I did coach football for 2 of those years and I actually really do miss that, but I don’t miss the classroom at all.

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