A quick brief about my adventure in the world of mentoring.

This one was HUGE for me….

First of all because it was a workshop designed to teach people programming in Python and Django.

Second I’m not a programmer.

Third it was in english

And last but not least my teaching and mentoring skills are below level of 0.

I’ve asked for beginning programmers without any knowledge of Python/Django.

I thought that if I’m very basic it will be easier to teach beginners…

So I was assigned to a group of 2 awesome girls: Alice and Raiona and we started our many hour walk over GGC tutorial.

Thanks for everything girls. I owe you big! *Your worst mentor ever!*

Lessons learned:

–  Mentoring beginners is much more challenging than expected.

– Knowing something doesn’t mean you can explain it to anyone. Especially in foreign language.

– Your mentoring skills are a resultant value of your language knowledge, your knowledge of the subject and interpersonal skills.

– Drop your expectations to become best mentor ever. it’s not going to happen soon.

– Be in the team as much as possible and leave space for your mentees to grow.

– Don’t do “Follow the tutorial and ask in case of questions”. You will get “sheeps” copy & pasting commands from the tutorial to their text editors and Terminal.app without any additional questions.

– No matter what you think it’s all about your mentees and sometimes you just have to spent several hours only on explaining  loops over and over again and how to use them to iterate over several lists.