Teaching

Recently I have been doing some R session for the folks at my workplace. It’s only been a couple of weeks but it’s made me think about a lot of things. About how so much of teaching involves learning and relearning, about condensing all the information into meaningful sessions, about how teaching is fucking rewarding and why don’t I do it more often? There is a lot to unpack here, let’s tackle all of them one by one.

Learning

Let’s take the current use case. R is a language I feel extremely comfortable with, I have been working with it for over 6 years now. I love the language and the community so much that you can call me an R evangelist and I would probably agree. And when I was beginning these sessions, sure the main purpose was teaching everyone the concepts and working together, but I also wanted to showcase the magic of the language. When I was scripting these sessions, I realsied I was also learning again. After 6 years I have all the information in my head without any structure, and this whole exercise was also refining my standards of usage.

Condensing

This next bit is the trickiest one for me. When you are aware of the possibilities of a tool and wholeheartedly believe in the value it adds, it becomes a little challenging to be subtle about it. I feel the same with R, I want everyone to know everything amazing about the language, but have to to wrap it into consumable bites. I have to understand to that not everyone comes from the same space and I have to respect their interest.

Rewarding

The last bit is something I am still confused about. It’s extremely rewarding to teach, I have done it a few odd times with my younger sister, I have been a guest lecturer and now I am doing this series. 3 very different formats, but I have enjoyed every second of it from start to end. Every time I do something like this, I wonder do I want to continue this beyond these one-off things. But then I forget about it till the next time. Maybe that’s a sign I don’t really want to do it. I don’t know, I will figure out I guess.

Continuing ?

For now I will focus on these R sessions. And to make them a little more interesting, we are doing #TidyTuesday challenges and showcasing our work. And all 3 aspects I mentioned above will come into play when I prepare for the session. And who knows, if these sessions go well I might do some around Statistics soon!

TATA!

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