For Non-Techies: Why (Some) Teachers Need To Code

Being a teacher involves a person in so many circles of conversation.   I find myself talking with students about what they see, what they understand, and what is and is not helping them learn.  With parents, conversations can move quickly from a specific grade or assignment to patterns of behavior to the hopes and dreams they have for their child, the place where we usually find our common ground.  With other teachers, professional conversations often revolve around what we're experiencing, what we're trying, what seems to be working, and why.  Each conversation involves a sharing of hope and aspiration, fear and frustration, usually with the underlying purpose of making it better.

Teachers are some of the most solution-oriented people I know; most of them are idea factories!  Thought Latin was boring?  Voila!  Witness a Latin course as an RPG, progressive online readings with audio, a video series, or a website...all created by teachers!  In my case, all of the aforementioned conversations and experiences continually cross-pollinate in my head, creating new ideas.  Some of these eventually take shape in computer code, but almost all of them are really about learning.  Apart from learning, technology loses much of its interest, at least for me.  I think this is because the human mind is more plastic, the human heart more dynamic than any static technology I can find on Earth.  Computers are cool, but humans are COOL!  We actually need and seek out challenges, our brains are constantly rewiring themselves to meet them, we tremble with a hope fragile yet resurgent, and we're powered by love.  And at the core of it, love is what teaching seems to be.  For this very same reason, I always feel like I am only beginning the journey.

Like most teachers, I want to make learning better.  Beyond my own children and my classroom, I want to reach out to people I will never meet and help them help themselves experience new possibilities.  When I'm wiring up an interface or indexing a database, I'm not coding because I like to code.  Often I really don't!  I'm coding because I want to help somebody learn.  As with lesson planning, I want to help engineer a piece of the learning experience from frustration to flow because I see needs staring me in the face, tools sitting in my hands, a clear vision in my head, and the right time at hand.  Like most teachers I know, I work hard not only to support my family, but because I cannot see the vision realized quickly enough, and because - partly through all those conversations - that vision is constantly growing! I know how learning energizes me, I know what joy and flow feel like, and I want others to feel them too.  It won't simply help students learn.  It will extend their horizon of what is possible to learn joyfully.

My own most recent app is for teachers not just because I am one, but because teachers make learning better.  If I can make a teacher's life easier or better, if I can make some of her "if-onlys" come true, he or she will take that time and energy and love students better.  It might be more differentiated instruction or assessment than was possible before.  It might be a little extra individual feedback where she now has an extra ten minutes she would have spent grading sentences.  It might be a quick glance at student process data before class that reveals students' frustration points and reshapes that day's lesson.  The teacher will know what to do, she will do it her way, and it will be awesome! 

I am a tiny piece of this puzzle, a larger professional conversation, but with abilities and drives that intersect each other in peculiar ways that cannot be accidental.  You are every bit the same.  Let's keep that conversation going, and let's make it better!