I learned to program in BASIC on a Commodore VIC-20 my parents gave me for my fourteenth birthday. I knew I needed to learn more, so I signed up for a computer programming class at my high school for my junior year. A schedule mix-up took over a week to sort out and I transferred in late. The teacher, Mrs. Otto, told me to do the best I could on the current assignment and promised to help me get up to speed afterward. The assignment was something simple like printing a multiplication table. The instructions said it should take ten lines of code.

I wrote it in one.

On a VIC-20, every byte was precious. You only had three kilobytes (yes, kilobytes) of RAM to work with. Line numbers took up memory, so I’d learned the value of cramming as much code as possible into a single line. To complete Mrs. Otto’s assignment, I nested two FOR loops and put all the operations inside the inner and outer loops. I may have used an array variable, too. I ran the program and showed it to Mrs. Otto. She said, “I can see that it works, but I don’t understand what you’ve done.”

Courage

Imagine the courage it took to say that to a cocky sixteen-year-old.

I later found out that this was her first time teaching BASIC programming and that she was new to the language. She could have said, “The assignment was ten lines. Do it right,” and dismissed me. Instead, she showed courage by admitting that she didn’t know something. I might have mocked her or replied with arrogance and impatience. She didn’t care. She wanted to know why what I did worked more than she wanted to appear knowledgeable.

Being able to admit ignorance, especially when you’re supposed to be “the one who knows,” takes guts. Mrs. Otto’s courage demonstrated the value of humble curiosity.

Empathy

By taking the time to understand why I chose to write my code the way I did, she also demonstrated empathy. When I explained how little RAM I was used to working with, she pointed out that the machines we had at school had much more RAM. Space wasn’t as big an issue. She said that part of good programming was making code easy to understand. Someone else might have to read my code later. Shouldn’t I make it easier on them?

Then she challenged me to rewrite my program. Could I do it in five lines? I could and did. Although I didn’t learn anything new about the language, I learned something new about program design.

Humility

Once she realized that I already knew all the concepts of BASIC that she was going to teach, she might have told me to transfer out, or let me treat the class as study period. Instead, she leveraged my skill and knowledge as a teacher’s aide. Sometimes she had me teach lessons and then critiqued my style. By stepping aside and letting me shine, she helped me grow skills I didn’t know I needed or wanted. Today, I’m a damned good Scrum Trainer and she paved the way for it.

I don’t know what I expected when I walked into Mrs. Otto’s class for the first time. Did I think I’d skate through an easy class for a semester? Did I hope to go beyond what I’d already taught myself? My journal from that time is of no use because I didn’t write it down. But whatever I expected, Mrs. Otto taught me more. I didn’t learn computer programming. I learned to be a better human.