no. 16| 06.16.2014 |
Pairing. Feelings. Pairing Feelings.
When I found out about pairing for DBC, and that it would be a regular occurrence, I was a bit apprehensive. I’ve never been much of a video chat person — it has always felt weird to me. (Though after 8 weeks of pairing, I’m pretty much over that.)
For the most part I’m happy to say that pairing has gone well, and has been enjoyable. Everyone I’ve paired with has been friendly, engaged and positive. I’ve been thankful and impressed by how generous people have been with their knowledge and time. It has been rewarding to learn from others, and then have the chance to share what I’ve learned with even more DBC students in subsequent pairs.
One of the things that can be frustrating for me: I sometimes have trouble “staying in the moment” to concentrate on the task at hand, especially if I haven’t had time to really get comfortable with the concepts a pair exercise needs as prerequisites. I’m used to learning things like syntax on my own at a slow, deliberate pace, and it can be difficult for me to pick up an explanation of how a code structure works in the context of a pair. I have a hard time really paying attention to the code, because I’m concerned that I’m making my pair wait around for me to get it.
Despite that worry, I’ve been getting generally positive feedback from others. It was a relief to see that my sense of how things went in a pair was actually in sync with my pair partner. Sometimes in life you don’t get to know that kind of stuff, so I appreciate the DBC feedback system for baking that into how we’re working with each other.
One of the most helpful bits of feedback I’ve gotten was actually from an instructor, who cautioned me to make sure I’m working collaboratively. Oops. Sounds like I’d been steamrolling my GPS partner, which was initially hard to hear. It is so rare to get a direct critique like that, especially in a school or work environment. Eventually, my initial embarrassment wore off, and I was really glad to have a concrete thing to watch out for, and check in with others about. That’s actually something I’ve had a couple of pairs do with me. In our warm up conversations, they mentioned things they had gotten feedback about and asked me to mention it during our pair if it came up. Pretty cool!
It’s always harder and more time consuming to write feedback than I think it will be. It’s most challenging when it seems like things have gone really well, because it’s easy to default to “good job, keep doing what you’re doing” and hard to come up with helpful, actionable feedback.
I’m imagining a DBC grad laughing at that. “Don’t worry, you’ll give and get lots of actionable feedback in the next 9 weeks.”
Here’s to the loop.