Tag: tips

Tips for New Trainers/Teachers

One of the things I was glad to have experienced in my previous company was my stint as a technical instructor. It was there that I found out how fun teaching can be.

I’d admit, I like teaching for the usual reasons too. Being able to impart knowledge to other people is an inherently fulfilling experience; the interactions between your students are just icing on the cake. Teaching also allowed me to improve my craft — there were many instances where my students have asked questions that I wasn’t able to answer immediately, regardless of my experience on the topic itself.

But I guess the biggest reason I like teaching is because I want to prove my previous teachers wrong. Whether it’s about their flawed material or about their inefficient approaches to teaching, my main mission as a teacher was to strive to avoid making their mistakes.

Given the post-course feedback that I have received, I think I did pretty well for a novice trainer. I’ve avoided a lot of pitfalls but it was inevitable that I fell into some of them too.

My mistakes pointed out by my students were disheartening, but none of them affected me as much as a certain article hidden away in our intranet: Kathy Sierra’s “Ten Tips for New Trainers/Teachers“.

Just because you’ve used lots of software doesn’t mean you can write code. Just because you’ve been in lots of buildings doesn’t mean you can be an architect. And just because you’ve logged a million frequent flyer miles doesn’t mean you can fly a plane.

But if that’s all ridiculously obvious, why do some people believe that just because they’ve taken classes, they can teach? (Or just because they’ve read lots of books, they can write one?) The problem isn’t thinking that they can do it, the problem is thinking they can do it without having to learn, study, or practice.

 

That article showed me how wrong some of my teaching approaches were. To add insult to injury, I found that article after my final stint as a trainer. I never got to apply those tips before I resigned.

Still, if you’re expecting to be put in a training position anytime soon, those tips can be a good starting point, helping you avoid the common mistakes made by trainers.

On Procrastination

Procrastination is perhaps my most serious character flaw. When I see that something isn’t really important, I tend not to do it right away.

People who know me might say otherwise, though. What they are seeing is actually me doing workarounds for my flaw:

They see me finish something way ahead of time.

Usual scenario: I get office mail to do something as trivial as update an Excel file or send the total page count of your work in progress. Deadline is end of the week.

I finish the task 10 minutes later.

Reason why I didn’t procrastinate: It was a trivial task. As long as I am not “in the zone” coding, I probably have a couple of minutes to spare doing trivial tasks. Besides, the mere fact that I have my mail client open means that I’m not too occupied at the moment.

They see me finish something not trivial way ahead of time.

Usual scenario: same as above, but the task will take more than 2 hours to finish.

I’ll finish the task 3 hours after receiving the mail.

Reason why I didn’t procrastinate: It was probably a mechanical task and I want to procrastinate on my “thinking” tasks. Usually these tasks are similar to the stuff I mentioned in the previous example, but in a larger scale. I get to turn off my brain and I get paid to do it. Everybody wins! (err.. sort of)

They see me finish something that requires thinking way ahead of time.

Ok, so the task doesn’t fall under the two scenarios above. What’s my excuse now?

Actually there are a couple of possibilities:

  • I try to fool myself.

Remember the mantra in my first post? Putting things in different perspectives is an effective way of applying that mantra.

Don’t want to fail Calculus? Put your mind into aiming for an A+. If you win, you get an A+. If you don’t, you might get depression but I doubt you’ll get an F or even a C.

Same thing with tasks. Deadline is next week? I could either personally shorten the deadline to this week (this is a bad thing, I’ll explain in a later post) or I could fool myself that it’s a lot more important than my other tasks so I’ll prioritize it.

  • I’m a competitive guy.

Similar to fooling myself, but I decided that this deserves a bullet point of its own.

For some odd reason, I don’t like to lose to other people. So if there’s a task that requires thinking, nothing riles me up more than the thought of competing with my colleagues — even though there’s no really no competition involved in the task itself.

Actually there is something that riles me up more: the thought of competing with cute female colleagues who are a lot more skillful and smarter than me. Go ahead, call me chauvinist if you want, but this M.O. singlehandedly allowed a guy who graduated with no honors in HS to graduate with Latin honors in college (my HS was an all-boys school… you get the picture).

and lastly…

  • I’m bored.

Yup, you read that right. Sometimes I procrastinate on all my tasks and I end up doing nothing.

Doing nothing = boredom.

Bry + Boredom = unexpected results.

Finishing tasks way ahead of time ∈ unexpected stuff that happens when Bry is bored.