Helping Change Lives
July 15th, 2010 by ComputerBob
During my second interview for my current job, they asked me, “Why do you want to work here?”
I told them that I’ve spent my whole adult life helping other people improve their lives — and I’m really good at it.
They hired me.
And now I’m getting paid to help other people improve their lives full-time.
Here are a couple of examples of why I look forward to going to work every day:
Example One: Last Saturday, two potential students took an entrance exam. One of them passed it; the other failed.
The woman who failed only got two questions correct in the entire 45-question math part of the exam.
A couple of days ago, she attended one of my tutoring sessions, where I prepare students to take their entrance exams.
After my tutoring session, she re-took the entrance exam (an alternate version), answered 29 of its math questions correctly — and passed the entire exam.
Example Two: Last night, a student came in and was working on his first assignment for his BASIC programming class.
After awhile, I could tell that he was “stuck,” so I offered to help him.
I quickly determined that his problem was that he was thinking like a computer user instead of a computer programmer.
So I explained that difference to him and then used the Socratic method to guide him into finding his first BASIC program’s logic and programming errors.
A few minutes later, it was working perfectly — and more importantly, he understood why it was working perfectly.
It was an incredibly perfect example of the thing that I love the most about teaching: Seeing the “light bulb go on over someone’s head” when they suddenly understand something that I’ve explained to them.
He was so excited that he shook my hand at least three separate times.
He asked me, “How did you know all of that?”
I told him (as I’ve mentioned here before) that I took a BASIC programming course — back in 1982.
He pointed at his head. “And you still remember it?”
“Sure! And now you’re going to remember it, too, because now you understand how it works!”
Once that lightbulb turns on, it stays on.
Then he told me that he had been really frustrated because he had worked on his program all night the night before, and then all day long before I offered to help him — and he had even asked four other people for help — but he hadn’t understood what he was doing until I explained it to him.
Today, he came back to “fist-bump” me and to stop by my boss’s office to tell her how grateful he was that I had helped him.
I was very happy to do it.
Afterward, my boss told me that 250 people had applied for my job, and she had read all 250 resumes, but when she read mine, she felt like she had “hit the lottery.”
I can’t even describe how good that made me feel.
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Coding, Education, Inspirational, Personal