So its been an interesting ride, theres not a whole lot of time to stop and write about what we've been doing but I need to write a paper on my experiences so I'll jot down some notable points here.
There are a few different categories of experience I'm having and not a whole lot of them relate directly to coding, but in general relate to the experience of running a business.
On the one hand I found this job and work with nate as a friend and employee and so am responsible for things like communication between our clients, professionalism and behavior, pay and hours, etc, and running that can be draining. Nate is by necessity the 'brains' of the operation even though I do my fair share of technical contribution. I'm just better at communicating and keeping a broader eye on how things are going and noticing, for instance, that the head of school wants us to do x,y, and z task that is a bit outside of our job description.This means that these kinds of tasks fall primarily to me because if I didn't do them, it wouldn't get done. meanwhile nate gets to luxuriate in actually learning how to complete said task and implementing it, and then I take over and translate what he is doing and why back to our customer. I console myself by at least getting some payment off the top of these kinds of arrangements, but I still wish that the traditional male role of 'computer geek' and 'focused task-completer' could fall to me rather than these annoying but totally necessary communication and bigger-picture tasks. So in a way I'm the project manager for this because essentially without my communication and setting things up our projects would utterly fail. Nate fixed the router for the highschool and was going to send them an email about it and I had to spend half an hour parsing through it to make it understandable to the head of school so she would both approve of, and pay us for, that work.
At the moment I've negotiated that nate work 10 hours a week at 38/hr (max 10 hrs/wk) at in return for IT work and teaching two classes with me. to get my 'money off the top' I'm charging 50 dollars an hour (max 10 hrs/wk) for teaching an extra class for all-girls, for making myself available for more office hours and for IT orders from her that I can then relay to nate and then back to her, and for teaching the two classes tuesday and thursday mornings.
Overall I'm excited to be such a successful business person that I can make 2k/mo and nate can make nearly that for about half as much work. I'm glad he's benefiting from it and its something he can use to quit his job putting kids in a headlock all week. I'm lucky to have someone so loyal and capable and open-minded who is willing to follow my crazy ideas such that they actually work out.
Challenging though, that in a way I'm his boss and so sometimes need to have behavioral conversations with him about social stuff because he's an awkward guy and does things like get too close to kids when he's showing examples. They recoil, and he doesn't notice because he's oblivious so its up to me to be concerned with such things and it can be hard to manage that. On the other hand when school started early unexpectedly and he had to arrive 40 minutes before me and do all the setup while I waltzed in 5 minutes before class- those are moments I appreciate our friendship and business partnership and think that an ordinary co worker would try to get me fired after a mishap like that. Its amazing to think of a work environment being such that you each try to work with your strengths towards a g oal, rather than being internal to a larger boss who you need to suck up to and sabotage the other/compete with in order to rise through the ranks.
This is more and more making me want to make our own company. I can think about that after finishing this portfolio which might then become our business name. Also at some point nate is going to need to work for a big software company as will I, that absolutely needs to happen and I need to be prepared for that. I do have plans for my summer though totally independant of teaching and from nate that I can share in 'plan planning February".
Back to teaching- another notable thing that is very 'feel-good' for me and rather civically minded, as well as being something the world needs, is this all-girls coding class the head of school is letting me run. It was my idea after the huge class that signed up for coding turned out to be 95% boys. I'll be teaching it myself after the normal class on Thursdays, from 2-3, and am looking forward to giving these girls perspective they otherwise wouldn't get. They already seem inspired after I gathered all the girls of the school in a room and told them they were just as capable as the boys, told them what coding WAS, talked about the challenges I've faced as a woman trying to break into this and why more woman need to give it a shot. None of them would usually be in a room to even hear it, to be able to make that choice, and i told them that I'm giving the gift of information. Why they are good at it. I refused to let them think they are any less capable. Everyone in the room basically signed up after I talked to them even though this is going to be challenging for me to do workload-wise. But I calculate that it will be manageable and its morally and financially worth it to run a small extra class. I hope by the spring to have a squad of super tough coder cookies ready to look into careers as developers and badass chicks in the future.
One other note to make is that Nate and I are becoming the unofficial IT people of the school. I'm already learning more about some of the basic stuff needed to hook up to get a building running (mostly through nate, but also because I've had to communicate a lot of this in a way that is understandable to administration which is great practice.)
So in summary just feelings super grateful that I came to marlboro and that Nate and I are such a great team even if it has its challenges, and for this school that has been willing to trust us and let us branch out to explore our interests, and for jim for great instruction!!
