Becoming a programming tutor

Last year, I signed up for a tutoring platform, and this year, by some chance I got a student from the United Kingdom. And this is where my journey as a tutor started.

I had been learning programming and other tech-related stuff like how technologies work under the hood. Though I was working as a freelance web developer, I still felt like I was missing something, I was learning but not progressing much.

Learning and building skills

I used to spend hours every day focussing on web development. My knowledge was increasing. I was trying different things and also, every couple of months I used to go back to the basics, like programming language, frameworks, etc. I was building projects and all.

Got a message for a tutoring session

3rd March 2023, I got a message from a software engineering student for learning Python. I scheduled a demo session so that I could talk to him and understand the problems he faced. It was a good session. I showed him how I would be teaching him programming. He knew what was going on but struggled with practical coding. So, we started to work on it. Slowly building the foundations and writing codes.

The result of our efforts

He passed the subject successfully. Though it was focused on data structures and algorithms. But, since he understood Python properly he was able to come up with the solutions for the problems.

After this, he and some of his friends started learning Java from me. I started my programming journey with Java when I was in school. But by teaching it I learned something amazing, that I hadn't paid attention to earlier.

Teaching others taught me

As I was teaching Object Oriented Programming, I observed and realized how the frameworks work, and how inheritance and abstraction are used and this was an eye-opener for me. Learning something and understanding what, how, why and when of something are very different. This teaching experience helped me to become better.

Feeling good for helping others

I taught two students Object Oriented Programming with Java. One of them scored above 80 out of 100 and the other one scored above 90 out of 100. By watching them grow and improve, it made me excited to share more of my knowledge with them. They benefitted from my learning and it was a big win for me. More importantly, it made me happy.

Got more students

Through that same platform I got another student but this time it was a 14-year-old child. I wasn't sure, whether I would be able to teach a young child or not. So, I just accepted it and we had a demo session. It wasn't how I expected it to be, it was kind of good. Since he was a school student and not a college undergraduate, I had to be more cautious and understanding.

My main objective was to teach him Python in the simplest way possible. After a few lessons I observed that, to make him comfortable with coding I had to give him challenging coding tasks. So, we spent a couple of sessions just coding programs one after another.

So I would just explain to him what he has to do and he would try it on his own. I explained to him how to think about writing programs and how to visualize them and we covered some basic algorithms.

Later on, I got suggested to more students through word of mouth(recommendations from the people I taught).

Conclusion

So I will conclude by saying whatever you learn, find people who are interested in learning it and if possible teach them. It gives you a new perspective and sometimes it also challenges you to explain a complex concept simply. Well, sometimes I do struggle to explain some concepts because in my mind I can visualize them, so I try different ways to explain and observe what explanation is easiest to understand.

I would recommend everyone if possible to give it a try, not to create a livelihood out of it but to gain some experience of teaching.

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