the teaching experiment / #11
on visiting the path not taken earlier in life
It's surreal walking through the halls of your alma mater, as someone expected to have answers.
The buildings look the same (and the rooms freezing still, somehow, after a decade), but it feels different when you're on the other side of the desk.
This past semester, I returned to teach design thinking — the first pivot of my sabbatical, a tentative step into the vast “what's next” I had given myself permission to explore.
Teaching runs in my family. My sister has been an educator for decades, and years ago, at a previous crossroad, I had seriously considered following in her footsteps.
I chose communications and later, design, but the path not taken had always lingered as a question mark.
In theory, it should’ve been an easy leap. As a design lead, I've spent years mentoring junior designers, running workshops, and explaining complex concepts to execs and stakeholders.
I had this image of myself striding into class, dropping knowledge bombs that would shatter preconceptions and shift perspectives.
It didn’t unfold quite that way, of course.
At work, there's a shared language, an assumed level of knowledge, and usually, a specific problem to solve together.
In class, I faced rows of faces waiting for the “right” answer — something I've spent my career arguing doesn't really exist in design.
In my first week, a student asked during a consultation. “What's the correct research method I should use?”
I launched into an explanation — the oft-reliable “it depends”: on the problem, the constraints, the users, and a dozen other factors.
Her expression shifted from anticipation to confusion to mild disappointment.
She had wanted certainty; I gave her complexity.
One of my sabbatical goals was to reclaim my relationship with time.
Teaching seemed like the perfect bridge: structured enough to anchor my week, but flexible enough for exploration.
What I didn’t anticipate was how elastic (read: no boundaries) it can be:
Class prep stretched, as I wrote and designed slides for longer than expected
Weekends disappeared into grading, while I practiced radical candor in my feedback
Evenings blurred into meetings for clarity and reassurance, throat turning hoarse
Then came a last minute request to take up another class, doubling the load.
For someone accustomed to tracking billable hours and shipping work on timelines — even extendable ones — it was disorienting, along with feeling drained and needing an entire day to recover from eight hours of class.
And the math wasn’t mathing, with compensation wildly out of sync with the time and energy investment — but I guess no one gets into academia for the money!
Teaching has been an exercise in both patience and excitement:
When a student definitely fudges research data to force their hypothesis through 😅
When they push past the obvious, challenge assumptions, and create something truly thoughtful
Watching them experience that fundamental design thinking revelation — that the problem definition stage is crucial — was also satisfying in a way that's hard to articulate, as was watching their vision come to life through amazingly high-fidelity prototypes of their own experiments.
These weren't dramatic "Dead Poets Society" moments; just quiet signs that things have landed.
As I submitted final grades, students asked if I’d be back next term.
That question echoes the larger one I’m still sitting with: What direction do I actually want to take?
I don’t have an answer yet, but it wasn’t a failure, nor was it an unqualified success. It was information — rich, nuanced data about what energizes me, what depletes me, and what I want more (and less) of in my next chapter, even in other forms.
One experiment down. Many more to go!
Other things
Being in China while the whole tariffs mess started sure was an Experience™
At least I had a lot of fun spotting many pandas, both real and fake!
Also hiked down some mountains, and wanting to double down on my fitness improvement frameworks from earlier last month so that I can hike more ⛰️