I became a teacher as a form of revenge.
I’m glad a lot of my peers became teachers because of that one special mentor that taught them to love learning. And I’m not saying I never had anyone like that in my life – just that my education history was vastly dominated by people telling me that if I couldn’t learn things they way they presented them, that there was something wrong with me.
When I graduated high school, my GPA wasn’t much to boast about, so I ended up at the Art Institute of Colorado, where I first developed a bad taste in my mouth for for-profit education. I did receive a decent education there, but many of my peers did not; I had some truly remarkable mentors there, but just as many that were happy to disregard my needs for bare-minimum mass-production of students.
It would take the next decade for me to rewrite the narrative of my ability, as I started as a lowly Jr. Dev & Slicer for literal trash at Waste Management (I joke, but I did genuinely love the work I did for them). When I started the job I was homeless, sleeping on couches while I waited for my first paycheck to clear so I could buy a mattress and clothes hangers; I worked hard at my agency, and eventually became a lead designer there. Then lead designer at a small startup, and then an agency with bigger clients . . . all the while I was learning things first hand, often well after I needed the lesson. I was underpaid and over-worked before I realized my real value to the people I served, I got cheated on loose contracts and allowed ideas to go live that could have hurt vulnerable communities. I sat silent while my coworkers were mistreated because I believed I owed allegiance to the people who paid me.
See above: Completely unprepared for reality
I set a low bar for myself because that’s the narrative I got from my environment – that being creative was an annoyance, not a skill. The abilities that would later define my career – imagination, problem solving, storytelling – were overshadowed by my inability to grasp math and science.
That’s why I’m happy to tell vulnerable personal stories, ranging from abusive clients to my struggles with alcoholism, because I know that speaking my truth might save someone else from the same fate. Why its not unusual for me to keep in touch with students after graduation, years after graduation; to watch my students hire other students, because there is a shared experience there, of being a part of a radical and honest learning experience that’s tough to describe to anyone else. I am tremendously proud of the culture and environment I’ve built in my classroom. And if there’s no way to go back in time and give it to my younger self, then I’m happy to settle by giving it to the 400 students and counting that I’ve been able to teach.
So, maybe now it will make sense when I say that when I got the chance to teach, I got my chance at revenge. Every cohort, I get a chance to warn a dozen or so others. Yes, I teach them Figma, we learn how to wireframe. But what makes my approach different – at least this is what I’ve been told – is that I am not here to teach the material, I am here to teach the student.
Above: Photograph from a spotlight in the Denver Business Journal
