normanrs

Reflect on the following prompts:

1. What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
2. How does empathy help you build better software?
3. Why is empathy important for working on a team?
4. Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
5. When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings?
6. How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?

Empathy has been crucial in my career as a teacher and in my marriage. "Meeting them where they are" is a mantra in mondern teaching, but it is a (somewhat suprisingly) essential component of a happy marriage. At some point (and it usually doesn't take that long) you figure out that a desire to make your partner happy usually involves doing things you wouldn't normally do. These can be as small as picking up after yourself and as large as learning the art of listening. In teaching, empathy is what allows you to successfuly differentiate tasks and assignme

normanrs

Developing the Mindset to Succeed

1. Read through 29 Behaviors That Will Make You an Unstoppable Programmer. Pick out 3 behaviors that resonate with you in the list and describe why they resonate with you in a reflection (4-6 sentences).

First "Use Google aggressively" This resonates with me because I already do it! In 2000 I entered grad school, 2004 started teaching at the college level, and for the last 4 years I've been a high school science teacher. Online research was key to all these endeavors. As a long-time "computer geek" I have, I think, a good intuition of how to write a good search query, understanding that more often than not the syntax is not as important as the keyword selection. Search engines aren't very good at making assumptions (though Google has gotten better) - they mostly search solely based on the unique concepts you request. I already open many of the first-page results not only to avoid ones that have been engineered to come up first but also to be scientific by viewing multiple s