264 hours: a first year of teaching, counted

In 2020 the thing that had accompanied every job I held since 1997 became the job itself. The delivery was thirteen courses in thirty-three days, 264 hours, 51 students. What that number hides is the rest of the year, which went into being allowed to stand there at all — because in this profession you cannot teach a course you have not passed.

The year everyone else went remote

2020 is remembered as the year the world learned to work through a webcam. For me it was that too, but it was mostly something else: the year a thing that had been at the edge of every job I ever held moved into the middle and became the whole of it.

I had been teaching since 1997. Not as a job — as the part of the job nobody put in the job description. Internetworking at Cabletron, routing at Riverstone, switching and access control at Enterasys, JUNOS at Juniper, and then five years of meetings, presentations, demonstrations, workshops and bootcamps for a 's partners and customers from inside distribution. That last stretch is the role described in what a channel systems engineer does: you support the resellers rather than the customers, and a large part of what you do is explain a product to people whose job is to sell and deploy it.

So when I say 2020 was the first year of teaching, I do not mean the first time I taught. I mean the first year it was the work rather than a side effect of the work.

The number, and what it hides

Here is the year, counted:

1 course attended as a student
6 instructor qualifications, covering 9 courses
13 courses delivered, across 33 days
264 hours in front of 51 students

Thirty-three days. In a year of roughly two hundred and fifty working days, the actual delivery occupied about an eighth of the calendar. A reasonable person looking at that would conclude I had a quiet year.

What the thirty-three days hide is where the rest of it went.

You cannot teach a course you have not passed

Qualifying to deliver an official course is not a matter of being told you may. For each course, three things have to happen in order:

Attend the course as a student. The whole thing, as a participant, in someone else's classroom.
Hold the certification the course prepares for. Not attend the exam — pass it.
Pass the instructor qualification for that specific course, in which you teach the material to people whose job is to decide whether you should be allowed to.

Only then may you stand in front of a paying class and open the deck.

I did that six times in 2020, and those six qualifications covered nine courses. Six times: attend, certify, prove. That is where the year went, and it is why thirteen deliveries in thirty-three days is not a light year but a compressed one — everything upstream of the delivery is invisible in the delivery count.

I want to be plain about why I think that requirement is right, because it is unusual. Nobody makes a conference speaker certify in what they present. Nobody audits a consultant's slides. But an official course carries a vendor's name and prepares people for an exam that will be marked by that vendor, and the person at the front is the only quality control in the room. Requiring them to have sat the same exam is the cheapest honest way to guarantee it. It is also, incidentally, a very effective way to find out what you only thought you knew: the gap between operating a product for a decade and being able to answer an arbitrary question about it from a room of strangers is wider than anyone expects before they try.

What a remote classroom actually needs

The other thing 2020 taught was that "remote instruction" is not a webcam and a slide deck. Setting up to teach a live technical course through a screen took four displays, and each one exists because something specific fails without it:

The course material, shared with the class. Obvious, and the only one anybody pictures.
The presenter's notes, on a separate screen. Not the speaker crutch you may be imagining — these are the reminders of what must not be skipped in a four-day course where every module leans on the last.
The conferencing window, on its own, so the room and its participants can be watched and managed without covering the material. Fifteen faces in a grid, hands going up, someone dropping out of the call.
A workstation logged into the remote lab, because the students are working in virtual machines and someone has to be able to see and fix the environment while the class continues.

Plus a digitiser tablet, because drawing on the slide beats describing the drawing. Anything I drag onto that screen, the class sees. In a subject made of packet paths and decision orders, that turned out to be the single most valuable input device in the room.

And then the part of the list I have always liked best, which I wrote down at the time exactly as it was: plenty of water, a fan, an ergonomic chair, coffee, and a mosquito racket.

That last item is not a joke, and it is not decoration. It is São Paulo, it is a long evening class for a timezone on the other side of the world, and a mosquito in the room at hour six of a four-day course is a genuine operational hazard. Every remote instructor has an equivalent object. Nobody puts it on the datasheet.

What the count is actually evidence of

Numbers like these are usually published to impress, and I am not sure they should be. Two hundred and sixty-four hours is not a large number in isolation; there are instructors who deliver that in a quarter. Fifty-one students is a small cohort.

What it is evidence of is a transition, and transitions are worth counting precisely because they are the moments where the shape of a career changes and nobody notices at the time. I have written elsewhere that the value of a decade at a vendor was never the products, because products go obsolete and the specific platforms I mastered in the nineties are archaeology now. The value was the shape. 2020 is the year the shape became visible: everything before it had been preparation for a job I had not yet taken.

The five years of partner enablement inside distribution were, it turns out, an apprenticeship for a role nobody was training me for. The certifications earned to sell and support a product turned out to be the entry ticket to teaching it. And the twenty-three years of explaining things at the edge of other jobs turned out to be the actual skill, which I had been practising the whole time while believing it was a hobby that happened at work.

That is the useful thing to take from a counted year, and it is not the count. It is that the part of your job you do because you enjoy it, in the margins, without being asked, is frequently the part that turns out to be the job. Mine took twenty-three years to move from the margin to the middle. Looking at what the years before it built, I do not think it could have gone faster, and I would not want the count to be bigger at the cost of what is behind it.