Why beginners should teach

Beginners! I'd love to see more of you teach. You have tremendous value to offer. In our industry, we uphold and revere experts. I get it. Experts do sexy slick things in time lapses, have nice camera equipment, and great hair days.

Here are 10 reasons why I'd like to see more beginners teach; for yourself, for your future students, for your peers, and for our industry as a whole.

1. While you may be intimidated by how many tutorials already exist, you have to remember your uniqueness. People like different teaching styles, voices, EDM BG music selection. And, I'm gonna guess a lot of those tutorials are taught by experts, which leads to:

2. Beginners acutely feel the struggles of other beginners: confused with the onslaught of tools, terminology, and where to begin. The initial hurdle is the hardest. It's the place where quitting seems most appealing because there's an endless supply of things to learn.

3. Beginners want to see other beginners. Representation is a very important aspect of what we do: People get intimidated when they only see experts teaching high-level things. Seeing another beginner make mistakes on "basic things" then recover is very encouraging!

4. More beginners teaching will also show more beginner work! It's unrealistic to expect that your first will be on par with a practised expert whose done hundreds. That's okay! Share your "uglies," as they're probably not as bad as you think and are an impt part of the process!

5. More beginners will mean more forgiveness for mistakes. Our society is so fearful of mistakes and the gaslighting. Totally get it. Mistakes are icky. Peeps are dix. But mistakes are a necessary part of growth. So make 'em! Share what you learned from them! Fuck haters!

6. Internalising how to teach helps you organise how to learn: Where to start, where to focus, basic terms, anticipating your students' questions. For my Skillshare class, I knew I had to narrow the scope of all #a11y down to something compact enough to digest.

7. More beginner teachers means more people doing things they love, even if they're kinda bad at it at first. For me, it's drawing. My talented friends have been drawing since the womb. I'm old AF now. I have no time! So many of the hands I draw are uggo. WHO CARES. I HAD FUN!!!

8. Diversifying the levels will keep experts grounded and aware of newbie hurdles. Experts become super users of languages and tools; hearing beginner teachers will help to remind them of the initial struggles and help to cater their future, more advanced tutorials accordingly.

9. More beginners means more humility! We hide a lot of the "sausage making" from our peers, clients, the non-design world. But what if we were more okay accepting imperfect, in-progress, new things? Perhaps imposter syndrome would be less pervasive and there'd be less shame.

10. Most importantly, more beginners will inherently diversify and amplify a broader group of voices who haven't been "at the table" and advanced to experts - WoC, trans, disabled folks. Ignored and repressed voices.

I see you. You have value. Share with me your beginners teaching beginners channels and links! I'll save 'em and share. DM me on Twitter if you have questions on how to structure scripts, platforms to host, etc or just need to get out of your own head! You got this!!!