Prologue

I got my first job on 14th April 2017. The company was Azim Premji Foundation and my official role was that of a Technical Consultant. In this I was to train the content-development team on the Ins and Outs of Linux and be a guide on their whole learning process. It was quite an educative experience. The contract ended on 14th September 2017. But I can still visit the office and work on random stuff (yes! the manager is really cool!!) =P

Now that this thing has ended I think I am in a decent-ish position to evaluate it. Honestly speaking I had no idea that my first job would be something like as meaningful (to me) as this one. I think I am lucky than most people because I got to work with technology that I love and I got to do things that I love as well (I have a small crush on teaching; mostly because I have had bad teachers and think we need to fix that!!) and on top of that; my job required me to learn more and more about Linux and to push the boundary. That is like icing on the cake.

This job shattered all the preconceived notions I had about jobs and how things worked and about "making an impact".

Making an impact

I used to be very short-sighted about the "impact" of a job. I always thought that "impact" is something that you can see from day 1. After working for 6 months I realized that it is rarely the case. I learned that good things take time and most of the time this time is because there are lots of situations that can arise in the middle; issues that were not thought off before. Also when you are working with other people then its very easy to get lost in the complexities of life and work. But this does not mean the all the small things do not matter; it's just that these things take time.

Teachers and Learning

Learning can be an intimidating task for anyone and mostly because learning something absolutely new can make you feel incompetent and that is not a good feeling. On top of that learning something new takes a considerable amount of mental energy and time.

That being said I do not find any difficulty in learning something absolutely new (this is only the case if I am learning something that I want to learn); but what surprised me was that even though the teachers I worked with were very dedicated to the cause but still they had difficulty getting used to the learning mentality. This used to bother me at times initially but then I had a breakthrough.

I am 20 years old now and I would say that I am pretty lucky since I have a lot less things to worry about than most people. But the people I worked with are not so lucky. What I was not accounting for is the fact that they are not as free as I am. I was judging them based from a very narrow perspective and not accounting for the fact that they were more than just people with a job. They have families to take care of of, jobs to worry about and hundreds of other things that need their immediate attention. So expecting that they would be "perfect learners" was an unwise thing to do. Thus even though the team was a very motivated team; they have every right to feel unmotivated from time to time.

I always had a personal grudge against teachers mostly because I had seen teachers who were not too up to date with the current material and teachers who did not inspire curiosity and teachers who would rather say the wrong thing than accept that they do not know something. I always thought that managers were evil mostly because how my friends (who were working) always complained about how their managers were not good and did not know enough about the underlying system and stuff (I am generalizing here a bit).

Enter the APF team

The group I worked with included three high school teachers and a Project Manager. The most striking thing about them is their open-ness to new experience and their humility. This is a bunch of people who are in their 40s; who are very good at what they do (being teachers) and who are actively learning new technology that would enhance the quality of education for high school students. Let that sink in for a moment.

We had one person there who not only used GNU/Linux so that she could create localized materials for her students (in Kannada); she was also an active contributor the the GeoGebra community. This is the best manifestation of the FOSS movement. I have been associated with FSMK for over a year and this is the first time got to experience the real power of FOSS for someone outside the developer community. I always failed to grasp the idea that FOSS is about the people and not the technology completely until this experience. After this realized the full depth of the idea (I think so). There is also another person who was teaching himself woodworking, calculus and German just because he wanted to learn them.

I am interested in Theoretical Computer Science and that requires some decent amount of mathematics which is not covered in great detail in my course. So I planned to take an online course and teach myself the maths. BUT I never did, I was too scared of finding out that I was too dumb or too stupid or too late to the party. In the course of these 6 months my interaction with these amazing people inspired me to enroll in 4 MOOC while the usual FSMK work and APF work and College course work (more about this later). I realized that its better to start than to just wait for the correct time. It is tough to maintain all of these at the same time (I think I am in-eligible for some of the MOOC certificates right now; but the certificates are not why I started taking the MOOC in the first place :-) )

Life-skills

Let's talk about humility and open-ness. I was under the impression that I got this job because I was supposed to know GNU/Linux and teach them that so I was very scared that a scenario might arise where I would be out of my depth. As a result I spent a lot of time doing some homework about the stuff that I had planned to cover that day. But I got hit by a brick when I saw how open these teachers were about not knowing stuff. I had never witnessed that amount of acknowledgment from a teacher about their own shortcomings. Now I think that I am a lot more open about acknowledging my own short-comings as a person. Furthermore I think that it is a disservice to yourself if you can not acknowledge your own shortcomings because we can grow as a person only when we acknowledge that there is more room to grow as a person in the first place.

Linux

This section will be very short! =P

I had no idea that a Linux based OS was so complex. I always knew that Linux was complex but I assumed that the OS built around would be simple enough. Nah! not true again!!! I couldn't be more wrong. Compiling LFS (Linux From Scratch) has been third best thing in this exercise.

Conclusion

At the end of these 6 amazing months I think its fair enough to say that I learned a lot more from them than they learned from me and looking back I had no idea that this exercise would be such an amazing educational experience for me. Being teachers is not easy and I have more respect for teachers now than I did about 6 months ago. Sure there can be good teachers and bad teachers (I hope I was a good one!) but apart from the one-off cases; most of the teachers are amazing.