Teach

During lunch time one of my female colleague asked me if I would teach anyone to play piano. Well, two questions pop up in my mind. First, how the hell does she knows I play piano well enough to teach? Second, why the hell she wants me to teach her? I wonder.

Hmm... how does she know?

Anyway, without much hesitation, I told her I don't teach anyone piano. Seriously, I doubt if I am a good teacher. I tried teaching some kids how to play piano before. They're between Grade 1 to Grade 3 (when I was just a grade 5). And the experience was horrible. Not only was I do not have a clue on how to teach, I also hate the fact about different students have different attitudes and the teacher was suppose to motivate them to play more and practice more. Duh! I couldn't even motivate myself to teach, please!

So, no I don't teach people how to play piano (even though one of my ambition when I was young is to become a piano teacher). And today, since my seniors (colleague) were away for vacation, I have to help out the juniors who are still young and fresh, with their projects in hands. Well, I am pretty free these days since the jobs assigned to me are not very urgent. So I thought I could help them a bit.

Need a hand?!

I thought it's gonna be easy just to give them some instruction or two to make them move their hands on the computer keyboard and do whatever necessary. But when problems occur, one of the junior (who is well-known to be very 'slow') could not solve it. Well, being his senior (for the moment) I patiently asked him to show me how he debug the system error. I let him do whatever necessary while I sat beside him observing. And after for like 5 minutes, I still couldn't get what was he trying to do. He basically look here and there, scrolling the page up and down. Curious, I asked him what was he trying to do. And guess what he said?

"I am not sure myself."

I was like "Oh my goodness!". Although he is a fresh-grad, he works in the company for almost half a year. And still not sure how to debug a system error? *Fainted* So I have to guide him step by step. Finding the root cause of the system error. And that was really testing my patience. You might not hear me yelling or screaming when trying to teach the junior. But I found myself frowning while talking (or teaching) him feeling irritated and annoyed. I am so bad, I know. My concern is if one can't even master the basic skill, how can one survive a bigger storm ahead?!

I don't think I am a good teacher.

Surely I have to put more efforts on this junior. At least until he could stand on his own feet without being too dependent on others. And once again I found myself in the role of teaching. Perhaps it's time to improve my teaching skills and leadership skills. Who knows, I might eventually become a piano teacher some day?