How one teacher almost turned me off programming forever

Growing up I owned a Commodore 64 when it was the computer to have. That was the last time I had a top of the line computer until I moved out, went to university and bought my own. My parents were not and are not technology people. When I was in junior high, the school I went to was an experiment where it used computer networks for the first time(yes, I’m that old…). I loved messing around on the computers and even got to do a presentation in front of the school board showing my awesome multimedia project. When I moved on to high school, I took a computer programming class that taught me QBasic because it was 1995 and that language still mattered, a bit. The next year I was excited to take the more advanced programming class, which taught C++. I lasted 2 weeks. Not because it was hard or because I wasn’t interested. It was because I had a bad teacher.

What made him a bad teacher? He wasn’t interested in teaching, he just wanted to talk programming with the students that already knew C++. I can recall to times I asked for help and he got frustrated that he actually had to answer questions. Myself and another student made it two weeks into class and fell far behind because we didn’t have computers at home and the teacher had no interest in explaining assignments in class to us. He was much more interested in talking to the students whose dad’s taught Computer Science at the university. This wasn’t the only class I’d had him for, he also “taught” me French in junior high. I use the word taught lightly because when I took grade 9 French, I realized I had no idea what was going on despite getting an 80% grade in grade 8 French.

Am I bitter? Maybe just a bit. I rediscovered programming later on after I discovered and fell in love with web design. Eventually, when I really got into ActionScript 3.0 and while it’s not a hardcore language, it showed me how much I really love programming and it makes me wonder what I would have been able to do if I’d learned programming in high school and not later. But, luckily, I discovered web development and had some great teachers at college. I was just struck the other day, thinking back, at how differently my life could have been if I’d had a teacher that wanted to teach me something that I would have loved. But at the same time, who knows, I might have ended up being a drone, programming rocks at EA. I love what I do and I very happy that I ended up doing what I’m doing, but it’s amazing how one person can change the direction of your life, good or bad.