Teaching

I'm writing this post because I'm procrastinating my TA duties. I have 100 lab reports that I need to grade, and I have absolutely no desire to do it. Grading sucks. One thing that I've come to realize, though, is that I actually like teaching people things. I actually enjoy my office hours when people come to me with questions and I can help them out with understanding concepts and how to do the homework problems. It's very satisfying because you're actually adding to the knowledge base of the people you teach. Grading on the other hand, to me, doesn't serve much of a purpose. It's an arbitrary measure of somebody telling you how much you know, on an artificially created assignment.

This leads into something that I've been thinking about for a while. I actually want to teach somebody what I know about poker. It will serve two purposes. I will be giving back to the poker community and helping somebody with their game, and it will help me internalize and better practice the concepts that I do know, in much of the same way that TAing has helped me better learn the subject that I TA. I don't know how I'll find a student, but hopefully some of my friends will read this post and realize that they really do want to commit to learning poker, or somehow I'll find a student some other way. Note that I use the term "student" here very loosely. By "student" I mean somebody who wants to be serious about the game of poker and is willing to discuss poker concepts with me.

Okay, now I'm back to grading....