I love being a Teacher

I'm on a teaching high the last couple days. I've always thought I'd make a good teacher, and over the years I've done a lot of unofficial teaching of classmates and coworkers; but since I started volunteering at Wintriss Technical School, I really am officially a teacher. (@see previous entry).
I've been teaching the same class for about 5 months now. It's tons of fun, very rewarding and definitely an ideal way for me to "give back".
I had an idea of having the school do some tutoring for intro programming classes for college students too, and a little over a week ago, got the first bite from a extension student. On Friday, met up with her at Chili's for the 5th-7th hours of tutoring on her final project. Initially she was struggling with the basic syntax a little and didn't really know where to start with creating her final project. What kind of introductory Java class says "build whatever program you want" for the final project? LOL - Deciding what to build is often the hardest part of coding!
I was questioning the decision to do tutoring for the first few hours, as the last thing I want is to get caught up in additional stress trying to get someone's project done on time. There's even an ethical dilemma since there could be situations where it's easiest to just feed answers/code - but that's totally not what I want to do - I want to actually have the student do their own work and just help them understand the concepts. In this case, for the rate that I was charging, I didn't feel obligated to achieve anything if the student can't create the code themselves. Ahh - the advantages of undercharging =P
After Friday's session, drinking at happy hour with coworkers while tutoring, which ended with getting her project (A TicTacToe game) done and seeing her happiness and sense of accomplishment; tutoring seemed like a good idea again. I think I also saw her improve somewhat in her coding confidence.

On Saturday, I taught my normal WTS class and learned that a scheme I came up with to get them coding at home worked even better/faster than anticipated. Two weeks ago, I gave them a code challenge to inspire them to get their home computer setup with the IDE, java, subversion, etc. I figured it would take a few challenges before they got hooked, but the first week one of the kids solved the problem and the next week he and his brother started working on making improvements to their Asteroids Game (the current in class project) at home. So rewarding to have that kind of response! I can see why people become teachers now =)

And then tonight, we had a teacher's meeting at the school. That was cool too. I've been involved in a number of startup business ventures, but this one is coming totally out of the blue. My motivation didn't have anything to do with money or even making the business succeed - I'm not even getting paid at the moment. Right now we just have one 4 pupil classroom, but Vic has a vision of expanding the business to 4 more San Diego locations and then from there creating 5 cluster branches throughout the US. I'm not going to worry too much about all that expansion, cause I'm totally happy just to teach a class or two a week - expand the curriculum, help Vic with programming concepts, etc. Would be ideal to find some contract work for about $125/hour where I can work in between 20-40 flexible hours / week depending on my availability... I am totally worth at least that much for a software development organization looking to improve their quality & development process, a software architect, or even just looking for a coder who will have a positive impact on the overall codebase, group dynamics, etc. If I had a position like that, then I could spend more time on WTS and other ventures/activities.