Back in D.C. – this time for two weeks. Two courses, one a week, 3 days each, with plenty of time to play.

This is a far cry from last November during which I enacted 5 death-defying acts back to back. When NetCom, an technical instruction/education outfit located in NYC asked me to teach a class on PHP in Washington DC for a week, they must have caught me at the right combination of boredom, poverty, ego, and apathy to make me agree. Add a dash of flatery,
and who knows to what I would have aggreed?

I found out the Wednesday before the Monday class that I was going. The Association of American Medical Colleges was switching from ColdFusion to PHP and they needed to know everything. The sheer amount of lecture hours to prepare was staggering. 5 days, 6 hours of class, PHP Beginning – Advanced, Object Oriented Theory, Databases, SOAP, XML, Smarty… the list goes on and on. The students were troopers, but many were dissatisfied with the lack of course materials (what could have covered all of those topics?).

I originally accepted the course with the idea of doing what was nessesary to fulfill my contract, get paid, and move on. Of course, things never work like that. Within minutes of my first lecture, I began to care about my students. With a manic level of zeel, I reworked all of my lectures, each night preparing for the next day. I didn’t sleep for a week. I remember laying in a tub on Thursday night/Friday morning, somehow having decided to return to the original Smalltalk article in preperation for my lecture on MVC.

At the end of the course, I wrote a summary to NetCom (attached to my invoice, of course) in which I described the best way in which to make the course successful in the future. Most noteable, how about 3 weeks of class time instead of 1?

It isn’t like I didn’t try to enjoy myself when I was there. After class on Monday I headed off to the Smithsonian. I wandered through some museums, not really aware of what I was looking at. At one point I ended up in a video installtion of some modern piece that was really quite… mesmerizing. I think that is the best word. I woke up half an hour later. I stayed in my hotel after that.

I got a call a week after the marathon had ended. The AAMC was asking for 2 more courses, so here I am. This time I am just teaching PHP Basics. Wow. What a nice change. This round, I am making up for lost time… starting with dinner!