It feels imperative to write a post about how I feel about teaching and how I first started working for DECtech. First, I want to say that before college I had no interest in teaching, but happened to stumble into working for DECtech through a friend. During the fall of my Freshman year of college, a friend told me about how she had 3 jobs and how one of them was as a DECtech Instructor. She asked me if I liked kids and I immediately responded yes because I used to coach younger kids on ski teams and I loved it. A few emails and months later I started working for DECtech as a teaching assistant.
From there, I was asked multiple times about becoming an Instructor but the combination of my stage fright in front of classes and believing that I couldn't do as good a job as the current Instructors led me to declining the offer. Then, when DECtech was moved online I decided I'd be okay with teaching online. This timing also lined up with the beginning of my Practicum and it was the semester after I had planned and run an Hour of Code Event for about a hundred kids. This experience helped my confidence grow, so I started teaching last Fall.
Even online, I loved teaching DECtech sessions and began to jump into any opportunity to speak with high school and middle school kids about my experience at Mines. The gears in my brain started spinning and I began to see a future for myself in teaching. While I have a job obligation when I graduate, I would be shocked if I don't someday end up teaching. I definitely love teaching younger kids because they still hold an excitement about learning that is lost sometime in middle school. When you ask them questions their hands shoot up and their eyes grow wide with wonder during their lessons.
Then again there is this change from high schoolers to college students where students become more confident again. They grow more interested in learning again. Maybe it's because they can choose what they learn about or maybe it's because they've survived those awkward teenage years. I'm not sure, but my point here is that the other age group I'd be interested in teaching is college students.
These two age ranges feel conflicting but they stand out to me as the ages of people that I would want to teach someday in the future. From this project, I have not only learned more about how to teach and about effective STEM outreach, but I've also learned more about myself and a job that I'd be interested to try in the future.