How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love to Code
“Could I learn how to code?”
My husband and I were running an errand and he’d been telling me about a coworker at his tech job who’d majored in poetry. This anecdote led me to wonder if I, a veteran high school teacher, could also be successful in a tech field.
Ben gave me a funny look and replied, “OF COURSE you could learn to code.”
He spoke as if this were the most obvious statement in the universe.
Let’s be clear here: It was NOT obvious to me.
Don't believe everything you think
I’ve always thought I was pretty smart, but I’ve been on a fairly recent journey of realizing some limiting beliefs I’ve held about myself. For example, I thought I wasn’t good at math because I couldn’t do arithmetic in my head. Despite acing my calculus class, I still didn’t think I had math chops because I wasn’t fast at it. I left high school saying I’d never take another math class if I could get away with it, even though I thought math was interesting and often elegant.
Similar misconceptions led me to think computer programming was not for me. I believed that to be a good coder you had to have started at twelve and you had to love sitting at a black screen, War Games-style, furiously typing error-free instructions. When I was twelve I was mostly using a computer to visit the official Beanie Babies website, so I assumed that I’d missed my window when it came to programming.
For years I had written off a massive category of opportunities because I didn’t think I could develop the skills. It was too hard and I was too late.
When my mother, a kindergarten teacher, was encouraged to do coding lessons with her students, I could have taken from that the idea that anyone can get started with coding. Instead it reinforced my idea that if you don’t start young, there’s no hope.
In addition to thinking that I’d missed my chance, I must admit that coding wasn’t really calling to me. I had a stereotypical image of a programmer in my head, and it did not appeal. Who would want to sit in the dark room staring at text on a monitor when they could be interacting with interesting people and saving the world? (I know this image isn’t true and that you can both code and save the world with interesting colleagues, but this is past Lydia. She was unduly influenced by The Social Network.)
I often thought I’d like to be a systems engineer, but all of my misconceptions about myself and about STEM led me away. I became a high school history teacher, and I loved it. Teenagers are fascinating and hilarious and I enjoyed working with them. I did a lot of work with equity initiatives, seeking to find ways to make school work better for all students. I taught students and coached other teachers for over ten years, and I assumed I’d be a teacher for life.
New problems need new skills
But something started to gnaw at me. Problems I could see but not fully parse. Issues I couldn’t solve.
I would sit in a professional development session and watch a presentation that was allegedly data driven, and I would be able to tell something was off. I knew enough math to recognize the information was not being interpreted correctly, but lacked the technical skills to explain exactly what was wrong. Or I would see a massive area of inequitable treatment and wonder what interventions might help, just to find I could only rely on anecdote to guide me. I would need different tools to tackle these problems.
Code for its own sake may have never spoken to me, but eventually, the questions code can answer were calling me very insistently.
I wanted to find solutions. I wanted to figure out if the changes I was making were actually helping my students. I sometimes pulled my own rudimentary data and computed it by hand, just to have something to refer to. It wasn’t enough, but I didn’t know what more I could do.
And then by chance my husband told me about a poet who’d become a software engineer and I suddenly realized that if I could learn Spanish, square dancing, and Argentine history, I could learn to code.
Once I realized that coding was a learnable skill just like any other challenge I’ve taken on, becoming a data scientist became a viable and enticing path. Schools generate data just like companies do, and that data is of little use if there’s nobody there to wrangle it. I have the passion for the field and the firsthand experience of the issues. I’m becoming a data scientist so I can better respond to the big problems and questions educators face.
I don't have to be a prodigy to effect change
Several years ago, Mark Zuckerberg came and spoke to the students at my school, encouraging them to learn programming. He talked about how coding is distinct from other skills and compared it to soccer. In soccer, everybody has to learn every skill for themselves if they want to be good at it. Everyone basically begins at zero. In coding, however, you build on what other folks have already done. You go to the peak of other people’s work and you start there. It’d be like starting peewee soccer with the skills of Megan Rapinoe and improving from there.
Zuckerberg’s words stuck with me, even though I didn’t yet know where I was headed. As I become a data scientist, I now know that I don’t have to fully understand the underlying structure of every function I call in my code. Someone else has given their genius to that already so I can build further. Someone did code in binary, but they did it in part so I don’t have to. I can stand on the shoulders of those computer programming giants and together we can go further.
I hope to go further in the direction of social equity. That’s where my interest and expertise lie. As my husband assured me during that errand months ago, I can learn to code. And when I do, I’m going to use it and the skills and enthusiasm I already have to make my community a fairer place.
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