I am not a Teacher

I've known this for years. Whenever someone has asked for help with trig or calculus or physics, be it back in high school or even now, I can give them the quick rundown, the salient points. When, after they've gotten the condensed version, they still don't understand? I'm stumped. "What's so hard to understand about this," I'd think. "I mean, consider the relationship between position, velocity and acceleration and that's derivatives and integrals right there! I don't get what you don't get..."

It is from this wholly un-empathetic position that I dispense my knowledge. If it's something you need to know, and it's stuck in my head? I'm not going to be able to get it out in the right words to make myself understood.

The ironic part of this is that I'm driven to teach people the things that fascinate me. Ask any girl I've ever dated and she can remember the time that I explained the Internet to her--the OSI reference layers, the interconnected web of redundant router links, the Transport Control Protocol which makes the web run, but performs shoddily on high latency or flaky links--they've all had to sit through the rundown. Probably multiple times. I have been accused in the past of "overinforming people against their will."

So I can lecture, but I don't think I teach. Ask any of the people who have had to sit through my diatribes about network architecture if they absorbed anything and I bet you'll get a lot of blank stares.

That's why I was so nervous to teach a radio class today. Actually, nervous is not the word, I've been dreading it. I put off my prep as long as possible, I even pushed the training back by four days when the convenient excuse of a commanders' conference came up. But as always, there comes a reckoning, and it caught up with me today.

Determined to at least get an outline together, some rudimentary lesson plan, I stayed late last night, sitting and staring at a blank Word document. As the temperature ticked down from 42 to 40, my fingers started to get a little stiff, a little numb. Already I had begun a PowerPoint Presentation with some radio features and configuration options, but it wasn't going anywhere. Plus, I had nowhere to project or show the slideshow to them, so it was a wasted exercise. No, what I needed to do here was organize my thoughts.

Finally around 11:0pm, when the temperature reached a balmy 38, I cranked out two pages worth of outline, with all the high points they would need to get two radios to talk to each other. With that much in the can, I called it a night and started the cold walk home. I drifted into the MWR tent which is right next to my place in an effort to warm up before I walked into the indeterminate climate of my tent. It turned out that Predator was playing in the little movie room there, and right at the beginning, too. So despite the late hour, and the impending training the following day, I settled in to watch Arnold earn the begrudging respect of an alien race... by killing one of them.

Arnold side note: In all those old action movies he plays characters with the most American-sounding names and yet he can't break out of his thick Austrian accent. I suppose Predator may be the exception to the rule as his name is "Dutch," which could be a hint at his region of origin, but just look at some of the others:

• The Running Man: Ben Richards
• Total Recall: Douglas Quaid -- I don't know if he can pronounce 'Douglas'
• Kindergarten Cop: John Kimble
• True Lies: Harry Tasker
• The Sixth Day: Adam Gibson

Every one of those names is as Anglo Saxon as John Smith, and he talks like he's just off the boat. I wonder if they give him backstories for his characters to explain this little inconsistency, or if they just brush it away with a wink and a nod.

I think the movie was a way to put off sleep, to push out my conscious mind and more opportunity to worry about the impending training. It's the same reason I listen to my iPod while I'm walking around and why I read before I go to sleep--closing your eyes at night, like walking alone, is an opportunity for honest self-reflection and must be avoided at all costs.

This morning I woke up and abandoned my cohorts in order to get to work a little early. I figured if I had just a little more time to go over the material, it would all gel and I would have nothing to worry about. All day long I watched the clock, waiting for 1400 when I knew they would arrive and expect me to know something about my own product.

When they finally did come, we had chairs and boxes set up as a rudimentary classroom, with a whiteboard at the front on which I could scrawl my unintelligible chicken scratch. And I proceeded, by fits and starts, to teach them the ins and outs of the radio system.

I definitely screwed up some stuff in the beginning. I made simple things too complicated, and complicated things too simple. I had to go back and explain myself on some points several times. And some of them continued to make mistakes after I showed them the problem multiple times. But eventually, they were getting it.

At the end, I gave them a simple, practical exercise: make one radio talk to another one. We put them on the clock, hoping to get it in under 15 minutes, but that first time they clocked in around 17 minutes. I sent them out for a smoke break while I reset the radios back to factory defaults and then challenged them again, but this time to complete in under 10 minutes. They scraped by at 9:37.

So mission accomplished, I guess. I could definitely do better if I have to do it again. Pick more clear scenarios, explain the concepts a little better from the start instead of having to clean up misunderstandings at the end. The sad thing is, this is really one of our simplest products--7th graders could do as well if they've ever peered into the Linksys router in their house. But I feel good that they can do it now, and that I didn't break into flop sweats and pass out.

Tomorrow is test #2, when they set them up in the field and put them on top of a 50 ft. mast. Will they be able to achieve comms? We'll find out...