Teaching to Learn


    Recently I have been helping new comers to my alma mater learn to code.  This is my way of giving back and helping to pull others up along with me.  Along the way I have discovered something about teaching: I learn more from teaching than I do from just going to classes or watching tutorial videos.

    Teaching forces you to keep up with the newest trends like syntax changes and different ways to write code you already learned.  It also enforces good debugging techniques and thinking out loud, forming your thoughts into questions.  It keeps the basics fresh while still being able to flex all the fancy code and techniques you learned along the way.

    It also forces you to think outside your own box.  For example when I was in school we had to build a project using only Ruby on Rails for frontend and backend.  One of the requirements is to setup 3rd party authentication through Oauth.  When I build mine and for a few other side projects I had built it out using the Devise gem and implementing Oauth through that.  However a few of the students I am helping decided not to use Devise but still needed to set up Oauth, something I hadn't done in Rails yet.  Helping them forced me to learn a different way of doing something than I was comfortable with originally.  It also forced me to reach into my knowledge of what Devise does in the background to help these students write their own versions.

    In the end, I think I will continue to help and to teach not only as my way of giving back but also as my way to learn new things about coding and reinforce the things I already know.

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