What teaching taught me

I remember that day well. It was late 2023, and I had just finished my time as a research assistant in the engineering faculty. I’d just presented the project I’d been working on for months: an inventory management system for the Barranquilla Food Bank, designed to reduce losses and improve distribution logistics. Something small with real impact, a contribution to the Zero Hunger SDG through engineering. It had gone well. I was happy.

And right that same day, a message came in inviting me to an interview. I had applied for something without expecting much: an opportunity to teach children about technology. I mentioned it to the professor I worked with. Her response was immediate: “You, a teacher? I don’t see you in that.”

I don’t think she meant anything by it. It slipped out. But it stayed with me. And it became my strongest motivation.

Not long after, I was a teacher.

I had never taught before, much less children. It was completely new territory. I had another job, so classes ran in the evenings (six to nine, sometimes until ten) and on Saturdays. I arrived tired and left happy. That’s the best way to describe it.

Kids are something else. Creative, authentic, uninhibited. They say what they think without a filter, without fear of looking bad, without the weight of what others might think. No self-imposed limits accumulated over years. When something doesn’t make sense, they say so. When something excites them, they say that too.

I taught everything from programming basics to video games, websites, and how to use AI to build their own projects. But the class I hold dearest was the last one of the whole curriculum: graduation day. Each student showed the whole group (parents and guests included) everything they’d built over weeks or months.

Animations filled with their own drawings and photos. Stories, real or fantastical, told in code. Video games about their lives, their dreams, their fantasies. The kind that make you want to keep playing. Projects I still think about.

I taught that way for over two years. At some point, the work started to include something different: training university faculty and researchers in AI use.

The contrast was stark.

Adults have edges. Self-imposed limits that children don’t carry. They don’t speak much, they hesitate before asking, they manage how they’re perceived. Many doubted me from the start, because I look young. That’s part of the work too: earning credibility in real time, in front of people with decades of experience.

But it’s been a good experience. There’s something particular about showing someone who has spent years doing the same thing, the same way, that another way exists. Seeing their face when they understand that with this, they can do their work in less time, with better results, and that the extra time is for their family, for whatever they want. To work better, not more.

No paper gives you that.