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Comment by PainfullyNormal | Hacker News Reader

Wait, so he's not teaching anymore? That was fast. In this interview 2 months ago, he implied that he was shutting down Zachtronics so he could go teach. Maybe I misunderstood.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1454395489?t=00h12m36s

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It's addressed toward the bottom of TFA:

> “My original plan was to wrap things up at Zachtronics and then find a new job teaching high school computer science, but the timing was off,” he says. “I just finished my first year of teaching and Last Call BBS hasn’t even been released yet! I was hoping that I’d really like teaching and stay with that for a few years, but I learned that’s definitely not the case and I’m having a hard time imagining anything other than games in my future, in some shape or form.”

Yes, I read that part. It's why I made my post. It appears to contradict the interview he gave 2 months ago. Again, unless I'm missing something?

He said he learned that loving being a teacher was 'not the case'. Perhaps he learned it in the last two months, or was trying to remain positive about the position publicly while reconsidering privately, etc. People change, I don't think there's anything profound to look for just because he changed his public opinion from a few months ago.

High school CS would be awful to teach unless you were at some magnet school or elite private school with enough bright students to fill a classroom. But even then, still awful.

My public highschool CS course was an honors elective taught by the calculus teacher, so I think that made it unattractive as a playground spot. However, I think it was really that the teacher was incredibly patient, kind, and unable to resist tacky puns. I think that helped us students see him more as a teacher than an authority figure to be resisted.

Thats

A) really fucking hard to do, I tried it once*, and I wasn't cut out for it. Teaching takes a special kind of person and a fuckton of effort, and deserves to be paid honestly more than I make as a programmer of computers which at least stick to their syntax rules.

B) the class was small enough that he could put in the individual attention and working-together to make it happen for us.

Unfortunately for the public school system the teacher left a year later.

* I did a boot camp for middle through highschool, and while highschoolers are tough, they were far more willing to work together towards an abstract goal than middle schoolers, for which every day is a bad time for everyone involved.

Dunno about awful. Pointless? Yes certainly, but most students just use it as a hour long playground, so you can focus on the ones that actually care.

But I don’t know, maybe things changed in the past 17 years xD

I can't imagine becoming a teacher right now. My kids are in public schools and the teacher attrition rate is off the charts because the past couple of years have been a horrific experience for many of them. Getting into teaching right now while the pandemic is still lingering and the education administration is a burned out husk is unlikely to go well, though I certainly admire Zach for trying.

During the interview he talks about his experience teaching. I got the impression that a lot of the job of a teacher is having to babysit kids (take away their phones) and that many kids just don't care about the subject being taught.

> many kids just don't care about the subject being taught

This sums up school and work for a lot of the population I think.

Thanks for sharing the interview! Check back in on the end of the show, around 2 hours 10 minutes. I asked him if he intended to keep teaching, and he hedged a little bit but essentially said no.

Doh, good catch. I missed that bit.

edit: I'm dense. It's your interview! That was a great one, btw. I really enjoyed it.

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