This blog was assigned as a part of my Flatiron Full Stack Development boot camp program. I have decided to use it as a record of my attempt to rapidly shift careers from an English Professor to a Full Stack Developer. My plan is to share some of what I learn while documenting the challenges I experience for the next batch of displaced English Professors who need to jump ship.
As I write this, it is the eve of my third week in the program.
I have not had ample time for reflection
over the course of the calendar year so far. My year started with a traveling nurse friend of mine warning me not to accept my in-person, masks optional teaching schedule. At the time, my area was at the extended peak of a wave of Covid-19, a wave I had not been informed by my teaching institution was even taking place. I asked the school to change my classes to remote for the sake of my students, my family, and myself. In return, they cut my teaching schedule to the minimum allowed by the union. Had I run my class as they wanted me to, I would have made maybe $6500 that semester. Instead, I only made about $2000.
It was obvious to me in January that my only path forward was to change careers. My teaching institution had been a good enough place to work pre-pandemic, one of the few places an Adjunct English instructor could expect to employ themselves full-time in the area. After teaching for twelve years in a series of institutions that saw instructors as glorified temp workers (or, worse! as saint-like volunteers!), I thought I might have found some stability. However the pandemic proved otherwise. My institution burdened teachers with the cost of switching to remote instruction, laid off many instructors, and used their “promise of likely employment” letters to keep us from claiming unemployment insurance. Faced with the stark facts that I needed to find better work and that I had very little income to lose, I started networking and researching boot camp programs.
I taught my lonely class remotely, and by the end of the term, the teaching union was arguing against vaccine mandates on campus. The very union I had invested in to keep myself and my family safe was working against my community’s interests. I hope the toxicity of that workplace fades with time. My community is going to take a long time to recover from the collapse of that institution.
Beginning the boot camp
got off to a very rocky start. For starters, I had spent all of my independent study time working with Python and pseudocode. These topics were a valuable investment of my time but they did not adequately prepare me to study full stack development. We also experienced an unexpected death in the family during the time I had intended to work on the Pre-Work curriculum. I finished the Pre-Work with a weekend to spare, but it was a very close race. Political turmoil in my community contributed to a less-than-restful week between the Pre-Work due date and the first session of boot camp.
The first session, I struggled with the long hours and my lack of sleep. The second, my mood was low and I barely retained my lessons. About half-way through Wednesday, with some decent sleep and some relatable examples in the coding lessons, I started to feel much better. I even felt some artistic inspiration, and I made a point of styling my labs in CSS. I was having good luck isolating and lifting working code from labs like a 90’s movie script kiddie. Instructors encouraged this kind of horseplay. By the end of the first week, I was in a great mood.
Unfortunately by about hour 4 of the second week, it became clear to me that I was lacking a lot of the fundamental linguistic skills necessary to actually compose working JavaScript code from scratch. For example, it was very easy for me to read, copy, and reapply code from a given event listener. But the moment I had to write that code from scratch, I couldn’t tell a bracket from a semi-colon. We might discuss the logic around an object in code, but I could not declare and code that object without a reference. Despite cramming over the course of two days, I failed my first coding challenge.
“So what was I doing wrong?,”
I asked myself.
“Ah, geez, self,” I said, “it sure seems like you are barely managing a big sack-full of traumas while also trying to navigate a high-stakes economic gamble on your technical competence! That sure seems bad. “
I wondered, wow, is this how I talk to other people? How do I have friends?
“Your friends all navigate their own personal hells!” I returned.
Anyway, I went on a walk to collect myself. I have this app on my phone where my friends combine all of our exercise into combined goals from Lord of the Rings. Ever since I started the boot camp, I’d fallen behind. But here I was, walking, finally with a moment to reflect.
Why am I failing to compose in a language? I must be failing to compose in a language because I am lacking development in key language skills and vocabularies. Remember how you taught language composition for twelve years and you learned how to teach people languages? Teach yourself.
I was a great English teacher. I have taught individuals literacy from the point of signing one’s name to 3rd year college English. Why haven’t I pointed the techniques of my former trade at myself yet?
“Probably because you have been living in a state of panic with barely a week’s worth of foresight for months!” I snapped back at myself.
Me was right, but I still found him intolerable. I mentally composed a paper debriefing myself from the coding challenge on the walk back home, highlighting key skills to engage, key vocabularies to train, and ways to engage transfer of vocabularies between skills. I ate a ham sandwich and typed it up when I got home. (This is not that paper but I might post it later.)
I have to take the coding challenge again this week. I’m going to try and use my language teaching techniques to guide my study this week. So I guess I will report back…
/s e e y o u n e x t t i m e