Why I went into the classroom

People ask this in interviews now, usually gently. You had a VP title. You had shipped at EA. Why did you go teach?

The short answer is that I was told to. Not by anyone in particular. By a pattern I had spent twenty years not noticing.

The pattern

Every place I worked, the same note came back in a different voice. It was the junior designer who kept pulling a chair over to my desk, always with a version of the same question, until I understood that answering it once was not the job. It was the review sessions where the useful part was never my note. It was the designer walking out able to defend the decision to someone else.

I treated it as a compliment for two decades. "You'd be a great mentor" is the kind of thing people say when they are being kind. I filed it with the other kind things and went back to work.

The other educator

My mother taught for more than fifty years, first through third grade ESL in the Chicago Public School system. Her students arrived without the language and left with it. I grew up watching what that looked like from the inside: the grading at the kitchen table, the students who came back years later, the way she never seemed to run out of patience for the question she had already answered a hundred times. I did not want that life. I wanted to make things. So I made things.

Near the end of hers, she had ALS, and I was her caregiver and her power of attorney. I will not write about that here except to say that it changes what you think a career is for. You spend a year measuring time in very small units and you come out the other side with less tolerance for spending it on things you cannot explain to yourself.

When she was gone, the pattern I had been ignoring stopped sounding like a compliment. It sounded like the one thing everyone had been agreeing on. And it sounded like her.

The decision

I did not want to teach as a retreat. I had watched people leave industry for the classroom because industry had worn them out, and I did not think that was fair to the students. If I was going to do it, I wanted to arrive with the work still warm.

So the choice was deliberate, and it took a while to land. I reached out to Full Sail when I left Third Time. In the meantime LunaFit came to me for consulting, which turned into a year of running product experience there, and the Full Sail conversation kept going the whole time. I had started out on staff at that school almost twenty years earlier, building its own web work before I ever sat in a studio. Coming back as faculty had a symmetry I did not plan and could not ignore.

The pitch I made to myself was simple. Twenty years of studios had given me a way of working. I could keep spending it on products, or I could hand it to people who were about to need it. And in the handing, I could keep a little of what my mother did alive, in a field she never worked in, for students she never met.

What it was actually like

Harder than shipping. I say that without irony.

In a studio, the work tells you when it is done. In a classroom, the work is another person, and they tell you when it is done. They are often wrong in both directions.

I learned to design a course the way I would design a product: a spine, constraints, decisions with a reason attached, and a way to find out whether it worked. I learned that the fastest way to understand why a design principle holds is to explain it to someone who does not yet believe you. I rewrote things I had said confidently for years because a student asked "why" and I did not have an answer that survived the asking.

And I learned that the pattern was right. Whatever I was good at, I was better at it when I was showing someone else.

Now

The role ended in August. The reason I took it did not.

I am back to making things, and I am pointed at product design roles, because that is where the work is and because I miss it. But I am not pretending the classroom was a chapter that closed. It is in how I run a critique now. It is in the case studies on this site, which read the way they do because I spent years learning to explain a decision to someone who was not in the room when it was made. It is in the fact that I still answer the message from the former student at eleven at night.

Mentoring never needed a title. It needed a room. I am just looking for the next one.