Forever a Student

When I was learning CSS’s grid feature (oh gosh, nearly ten years ago), I posted a few short videos talking about my understanding of the feature and how it worked.

I was surprised to get scolded for sharing inaccurate information, “especially as a teacher”.

Wait, what?! Who, me?!

I get things wrong all the time. That’s part of learning. But it was the teacher remark that threw me because I’ve never considered myself a teacher. Yes, I’ve spoken at conferences and put on workshops but the label of teacher isn’t one that I feel comfortable with.

Perhaps I associate the word with all-knowing authority figures standing in front of a class and I’m far from all-knowing, or an authority, or have much of a figure. I have stood in front of classes, though.

I imagine myself more like Stuart from the Mad TV sketch saying “look what I can do!”

When I first got into web development, I built a web page that displayed a table pulled from a database. When I showed my friend, he wasn’t all that excited. “Is that it?” It was, after all, just a table on a page. (Which, hey, it was 1996. Everything was just a table on a page.)

This blog has been a 25+ year journey of me saying “look what I can do” over and over again. I enjoy the process of learning new things and sharing what I’ve learned. Writing about what I’ve learned helps me learn even more because I build prototypes and test in different browsers as I try to understand all the nuances of something in my effort to write about a topic.

Even with the research and prototypes and testing and writing, I’ll get things wrong but one of the things I have learned is not to admonish people sharing what they’re learning, even if they get it wrong. We should all be forever a student.