How teaching what I didn’t know made me a better educator

At the end of 2016, I was lucky enough to be asked back to my university to assistant lecture on a design and production class. This involves running around and helping students at their computers as they grapple with InDesign and Photoshop problems, both programs which I am reasonably familiar with.

It had been going really well… until GREP.

According to Wikipedia:

GREP is a built-in function of the Perl programming language, that finds elements in a list that satisfy a certain property.

Safe to say, I hadn’t the foggiest clue what it was. And here I stood before a group of 30 university students expected to troubleshoot a language I didn’t know existed 15 minutes ago. Disguising my anxiety behind a thin veil of confidence, I attempted to answer questions I honestly didn’t know the answer to.

Surprisingly I was not ousted as a fraud, and in fact I engaged in the most satisfying and proactive interactions in my short time as an educator. Because I was no longer the one with all the answers, I found my approach to troubleshooting changed. Instead of doling out answer after answer as fast as I could, I was forced to ask more questions and work together to come to a solution. Many times, problems were solved by asking the right questions, and others times multiple attempts were tried with repeated failures before coming to a resolution.

Not only does this approach more accurately represent the trial and error required for all productive work, but it also meant that there were no stupid questions — because I had them too!

Whilst I don’t plan to begin every lecture in complete ignorance in the future, this story highlights the value in the process of learning, not the end destination.