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Today’s event is what we’re calling a fireside chat conversation between Reuven M. Lerner and Dhavide Aruliah, discussing training. Both of them have significant expertise in Python training. They’ll be telling you more about their background there. And we’re coming in without a lot of structure to it. We just want to talk training, see where it goes, and enjoy the conversation. Dhavide, you’re on the left on my screen. Why don’t you introduce yourself?

Dhavide Aruliah (01:50): Thank you, Brian. As you said, my name is Dhavide Aruliah. I came into Python training from kind of an odd direction. I was a university academic professor for a long time. In my heart of hearts, I’m a mathematician, I guess … I used to teach applied mathematics and computer science in Ontario, Canada, at a place now called Ontario Tech University. I was previously a postdoc at University of Western Ontario and at the University of Toronto. I did my Ph.D. at the University of British Columbia. Anyway, at some point around eight years ago, after sort of becoming disenchanted with certain aspects of academia, I left to join what was then Continuum Analytics … now … and eventually became Anaconda, and I started as a Director of Training there. I had been very much involved, I think, in sort of a lot of the Python boot camps that Software Carpentry developed from about 2010 onward. So around 2015, when I was ready to leave academia, I signed on at Continuum Analytics. I was the Director of Training there when they transitioned to becoming Anaconda. I worked briefly after that as an independent consultant, but I’ve always sort of been in the area of education and training, which was sort of more of my forte even when I was an academic. And since 2020, I’ve been at Quansight as Director of Education here, overseeing our … sort of Python training program and offerings. So I guess I’ll let you go now, Reuven.

Reuven Lerner (03:49): Sure. So I’m Reuven. I’m originally from the US, but I’ve been living in Israel for about 25 years now. My background is in computer science. So, I graduated with a degree in computer science from MIT. And I right away started working in industry, work for HP, work for Time Warner, doing some web technologies, medical technologies. And when I came to Israel in ‘95, I set up my own consulting shop. And pretty soon I discovered that people were interested in not only having me do the actual coding, but they also wanted me to teach them to do what I was doing. And at the time I was using a combination of Perl and Ruby and Python. And over the years that sort of shifted a bit. And at a certain point, I guess about 10-15 years ago, I said, wait a second. The part that I’m enjoying the most of all this work is actually the training. And the part of that that I’m enjoying the most is the Python training. So for somewhere between … more than ten years, for sure, my day-to-day job has been doing Python training for companies all over the world, going there, doing in person training, doing online training, and then increasingly also training for individuals with video courses, paid newsletters, books and the like. And I’m always trying to learn new things about Python that I can pass on, and Pandas for that matter, that I can pass on to my students, but also learn more and more about training and education that I can pass on to other trainers. So we can sort of be better at what we do.

Brian (05:18): Excellent. Well, it’s really terrific having you both here. I, for one, am extremely excited to be able to listen in on the expertise and experiences that the two of you will be discussing. So, from here I have a couple of ideas for conversation points we could start in, or if one of you has someplace you’d like to start, please jump in.

Dhavide (05:41): I’m good with you teeing us up, Brian.

Brian (05:44): Very good. The first point I had was, ‘When did you realize you enjoyed training and when drove it home?’ … you’ve both already touched on that in your background. So the second one was: one of the things that’s very important just in every part of life is communication, communication skills. And, in order to train effectively, you have to communicate effectively. What have your experiences been in your learning processes for developing your communication skills as it relates to training? But also outside of that … did you discover instances where what you were trying to train someone on, you were hitting a blocker and realized it was a communication problem, choosing the wrong words, phrasing things in a way that wasn’t making sense. What thoughts on communication skills? Listening and choosing your words and things to make training effective.

Dhavide (06:43): Do you mind if I start off, Reuven?

Reuven (06:45): Go for it.

Dhavide (06:47): So again, I think I have a very … my perspective comes from the fact that I was for most of my adult life in academia and I was a university professor. Touching on your first question a bit, I realized fairly quickly that I really enjoy teaching, and research is part of that gig as well, and there’s a lot of competition and issues around that in terms of how those are ranked and rated at most universities.

But coming to your point about communication. What I feel is a very underappreciated property of a professor’s job that I learned, is that there’s a lot of subtlety and nuance in the way that you actually have to communicate to people at different levels. So, for instance, very often I’ll be at a cocktail party or something, and people would say, ‘What do you do?’ And I had an easy answer for this when I was a professor, because I’d say, I’m a math professor. And then people would tell me how much they hate math or how much they had a high school teacher or something that really put them off.

But people would also ask me about my research, and one of the first things I would do when people asked me that is, I would come back and say, ‘Okay, well, where are you coming from? What do you know? Did you study math up to grade twelve, up to the end of high school? Did you study any at university or college? Did you do any postgraduate work? And what area did you study in?’ Right? And there’s a lot of things you have to dig. Because even the difference between someone who’s a first year undergraduate and a second year undergraduate or even a first year undergraduate who has completed first semester calculus and a first year undergraduate who is midway through their second semester of calculus—there is vocabulary and terminology and concepts that you can use when you’re just talking to them, that you can’t, based on their level of experience. Right? Or even someone who is an incoming master student or an incoming PhD student versus someone who’s a final year PhD student, and you want to use … and then there’s also, like, what discipline they’re studying? Are they in biology? Are they in social sciences?

So there’s a lot of nuance in the way that you actually want to try and tease some information out of them so that you communicate at the right level, so that you don’t go over their heads and make them feel … and sound kind of inadvertently patronizing. But on the other hand, if you don’t go under their level, where you actually feel, you’re kind of patronizing in the other direction, where you’re underestimating where they’re at, right? So it’s very challenging to sort of really get that right level, and you can only do that by sort of asking them the right leading questions. People will always ask, ‘How should I get started learning Python?’ … well, where are you starting from? What is it you want to do with it? There’s a lot of questions you have to ask first so that you can give an answer that is actually useful for them. So that was my long winded answer to your simple question.

Reuven (10:11): Well, that’s sort of like the danger of having people who teach for a living answer questions, that we can go on for 8 hours, right? But if you want a slightly, slightly shorter answer—look, it’s all about communication. It’s all about communication. And, much as I’d like to think that I’ve had all sorts of advantages here … where I’ve been writing for many years, and the writing helps me to sort of crystallize how I’m going to explain certain things. At the end of the day, I think it’s a lot of trial and error. And the analogy that I often make with training is to stand up comedians. Not because I expect people to laugh at my jokes, as my family will tell me I should not, but because when you see a comedian, what they’re doing, both the content and the tone and the speed and how they even stand has been refined over many, many iterations. And each time they see what works and what doesn’t. And when you finally see them present their craft, it’s the result of 10, 20, 30 times, plus a whole lot of experience.

And so what I always try to do when I’m teaching is try some new things. And I see, does this work? Does this not work? Does this explanation help? Does it not? And over the years, there are certain metaphors I’ve used which have worked wonderfully. And then I’m like, okay, this is working great. I’m going to keep going with this and refine it. And there are others which just work like a lead balloon. And so I’m constantly experimenting and trying and then reusing the things that work. I would go so far as to say that, before trying to teach something, I try to write it out. I try to present it at a conference. I try to do all sorts of things before it’s in the classroom, so that I can get the rusty parts out, at least to some degree.

Brian (12:04): Yeah, that makes sense. So actually, that ties into one of the other items I thought of is, are there any specific examples? Particularly … I don’t want to put anyone on the spot, but … poignant examples of things that really did not work. What is a thing you tried that’s like, oh, well, that really went poorly, just to show the audience you’re human just like the rest of us, right?

Reuven (12:31): Oh, there’s so many things. There’s so many things. So I’ll give the simplest example, which is: the first time I gave an intro Python course, I believe it was a two day course. So, like, two eight-hour sessions, minus lunch, minus breaks. And I think that what I tried to do was introduction to general Python and objects and regular expressions and a whole bunch of additional things. And I might have even covered all those subjects by mentioning them in passing as I was speaking at breakneck speed. But I would not call that teaching, and I would not call what happened there learning.

And so, it took me a while to sort of recognize that … first of all, I can push back on my clients and say to them, you want me to cover all those things. It’s not possible in that amount of time. I’ll go so far as to say, also … you’ve probably heard of the Lake Wobegon Effect, where all of them are above average. Every company I talk to is like, ‘Well, our people are so smart, they can do your four day course in three days.’ I’m like, no, humans just don’t work that way. I don’t care how smart they are. And so realizing that I can remove content and that they will be happier … took me a while to realize. And so every year I basically remove content and add exercises in all of my courses and people are happier.

Dhavide (13:54): I’m going to follow up on what you said there, Reuven, and actually there’s a question and what is the most important tip you would give to your younger self when you just started your training career? So touching on this question for Michael and following on what Reuven just said, I think one of the really big things is about expectation management. I think one of the things that I would say that is really important.

So what Reuven just said about taking stuff out, there’s a sort of a nuanced conflict in the way you negotiate when you’re doing the sales engineering for a training gig that, to a degree, happens with making course outlines for a college or a university class, but is much more on the line when you’re actually signing an SOW for a training engagement with someone who’s shelling out hard bucks to come and train their team. And that is, there is the expectation …. the person who’s paying, the manager, says, ‘Hey, I want to get as much bang for my training buck as possible.’ So what they’re going to want to do is cram in as many things as possible. And they are trying to do this maybe to impress their manager higher up. And they’ll often try … no one ever got fired for hiring IBM, so to speak. They’ll try and go a safe route to do that.

So … there’s a bit of salesmanship you have to learn to do this. So coming to the question, to Michael’s question, I think the most important thing to do is actually make sure that there is a clear expectation management negotiated before you step into the classroom. Because … if they have said, and as Reuven said, you can push back a little bit on the client, if they say, ‘We want you to do all of these things, but we only want you to do it in one or two days,’ right? You can push back and sort of say, ‘Well, look, you can do this, but it ain’t going to work.’ And really you have to figure out how to get the most … there’s a bit of a weird conflict that can exist also between the manager who’s buying the training and the people who are actually wanting to be trained in the room, right? And you sort of have to thread that needle or walk that line or whatever metaphor you want to use around that. And, if you’ve actually negotiated that successfully, you can actually find some way of actually pleasing everyone there. But you really have to kind of get skilled at having that conversation with folks. And that is I think one of the things I would say is a really important thing to learn in doing this.

I’ll let Reuven touch more on that.

Reuven (16:40): Yeah, so I guess it was about four or five years ago already, I had a company call me up and say, ‘We’d like you to do Git training.’ I said, ‘Great! I love teaching Git.’ And they said, ‘Tell us about the course.’ I said, ‘Well, it’s a two day course and I take up to X number of people,’ and they said, ‘Well, here’s the thing: we really need to get all of our people up to speed on Git really fast. So can you teach 50 people in one day?’ And I said, ‘I can. I strongly recommend we not do this, but if you insist, I’ll do it. But I’m telling you right now, it’s not going to be pedagogically effective because I won’t be able to give them the individual attention and I’ll be whizzing past things too fast.’ They said, ‘No, we have no choice, we will do this.’ So they shelled out a lot of money. I couldn’t complain about that, right? Because they had so many more people and it was one day and I come home exhausted. And, within the next year that same company called me back to do many more Git courses for these same people, in a two day format, because they realized that it had been ineffective.

And so, being able to come in with some authority saying, ‘Look, I’ve done this before. I really want what’s best for your people. I’m not just trying to get more money out of you, but this is really what’s going to … trust me, as an expert in teaching.’ It takes a while to sort of get to that level of confidence and be able to pull it off … and yeah, not everyone’s going to believe it, not everyone’s going to go for it. And then sometimes you have to decide, okay, do I take their money and do something that’s substandard or do I turn my nose up at it? Usually I’ll take the money, and I will write them in advance and say, ‘Look, you should know this is going to be a problem.’ And then I feel like I’ve covered myself to some degree.

Dhavide (18:27): Yeah, there is some skill that … and confidence you need in actually figuring out how to negotiate those things, for sure.

Actually, I’m going to touch on another question here. Michael has posted another: ‘I’m looking at online courses, live online courses, recorded, and in-person training. Which one has the highest ROI? And that’s a real … I don’t know how to answer that question in terms of, I haven’t had enough experience of actually measuring this. I will give… my personal opinion is that live, whether remote—I really hate the word ‘virtual’ training because it makes it sound like you’re not actually training. I always use ‘remote.’ But remote live or in-person live, I think are, I mean … personally, I prefer in person because I get to be there and talk to people and be face to face. Remote has the advantage, I don’t have to fly anywhere and it’s cheaper for the client and can also be staggered, spaced. You can do six half days instead of three full days, spaced out.

But, I will say, recorded is, in my opinion, the least effective way of doing things, because all you can do is … you can rewind and you can watch the same segment over and over again, which on some level is equivalent to actually reading a book. Whereas if you actually have a live interaction and there’s a question, you actually have a chance for some feedback and to try and really get … dig deeper into where the cognitions and where the misunderstandings may lie. And that is, again, it’s a more tricky thing to do. But I don’t know. There is some pedagogical research I can look at that … I can probably cite my colleagues at Software Carpentry, or have all sorts of references there around this, but I’m not per se an expert on what actually the ROI would be. Maybe Reuven actually has some more quantitative experience around this.

Reuven (20:50): So I have no actual data, but I have a lot of personal experience, and I’m willing to 100% agree with you that if you sort of divide into three levels, that the best is in person, same place, same time, live instructor. The second best is live, but online with live instructor and the third best and down quite a bit is the recorded. Because at the end of the day I think education is all about interactions. And so, sure, if you do an in person class and no one asks any questions and … then, it might be as ineffective as doing it online. Although I don’t think that’s true, because there is something to the presence and being in the same place and so forth. But the moment that people start asking questions and interacting and pushing back, and I can go over to their computers and see what they’re doing … I can have them pair program. I say to them, ‘Two people on one computer, you will hate this. But those of you who do it will learn a lot more from the class.’ And those who do it, what do you know? They learn more from the class, and they can’t do that effectively with online learning. They certainly can’t do it effectively with recorded things. I recognize that it’s a trade off in terms of effectiveness versus cost that many companies are just looking at the bottom line and it’s kind of frustrating for them to have to pay more to fly someone in and so on and so forth. But I do think that it’s better.

I’ll add that with some of my online classes, what I do with companies sometimes is like a hybrid, where I’ll say, ‘Fine, you want to use my videos? Great. How about we throw in office hours once or twice a week where people can then ask questions.’ And then, I don’t want to say it’s the best of all worlds, but it’s way better than just doing the recordings and those who have done it have enjoyed it quite a lot.

Dhavide (22:36): Yeah, yeah. There’s another question here. Now that code copilots are going to be the syntax expert, isn’t programming language training under threat?

Reuven (22:48): Hope not.

Dhavide (22:54): I guess it really depends on … so, I’m not particularly worried about that. I think that it depends on what you’re viewing. I think where training is an interesting product versus consulting services, in the sense that the desired outcome is not … so, with soft … you know, if you’re if you’re doing a consulting project and you try and you ask to produce a certain amount of code that does something, you can write unit tests, you can figure out whether or not it actually does what it’s supposed to do. There are ways of evaluating that, clearly and irrefutably in some sense, depending on how well the spec is written out.

With training, the deliverable is a mental model that exists in the heads of the people who are being taught, which is a much more difficult thing to comprehend and to grok. I mean, and that’s the same thing, by the way, I would say with … back from my days as a professor where I was teaching and having to assign grades and figure out what the heck did these people learn? And we have very flawed mechanisms for figuring these things out. The fact that ChatGPT and LLMs are able to do well on the SATs is sometimes sort of being touted as like, ‘Wow, aren’t these LLMs great?’ Rather than like, ‘Wow, aren’t these testing materials really not very good, because they’re not measuring what it is we clearly want to be measuring, which is how well people are understanding these things.’

So, I think as long as there are leaders in a position to actually … who recognize that what they’re trying to get out of training, and recognize what the value is of having people that can do certain things … and I think that on some level, there needs to be … I talk about this a lot with my academic friends, right? About the LLMs and about what this is going to do for what we’re teaching at colleges and universities. And I think the sensible thing is, you can use this to up your game in how well you’re teaching, right? You use ChatGPT as an exercise for students and sort of say, ‘Okay, here’s the thing … or, Code Copilot, here’s the code that is generated. How do we know that this code is doing well? That’s why it’s a unit test around this. Is it doing what it’s supposed to do? Is it working well?’ Right? So there are ways that we can use this to up the game in training rather than actually be … view it as a threat. That’s my personal view around this. I don’t know if, Reuven, you have any other perspectives on this?

Reuven (25:41): Yeah look, first of all, no one knows exactly where this is going, right? But this is clearly a game changer to many, many white collar jobs … and white collar thinking jobs, creative jobs that we thought were sort of immune from technological progress. So it was like, well if those factory workers are losing their jobs to robots, they’re just factory workers. But ‘Oh my God, they’re coming for the lawyers and the programmers. What are we going to do?’ Right? So, the thing is, there are still factory workers. However, they have to up their game and they have to be more educated and they work at a higher level of abstraction. My accountant still has work to do even though Excel exists, and my daughter, who’s in her first year studying architecture still has work to do even though AutoCAD exists.

Now, how are we going to integrate this into our teaching? It’s a fantastic question. How is it going to be integrated into industry? It’s a great question, and no one knows. Eric Mathis, who’s a prominent member of the Python community, he wrote in his newsletter, his mostly Python newsletter, a whole series about ‘What does it mean to learn to program in the age of AI?’ and he used ChatGPT for a bunch of different things. We had a session at the Education Summit at PyCon about this as well, and everyone’s sort of half fearful and half excited, but the key thing is to try.

And so I actually … with a class about maybe a month or two ago, I decided like, hey, we’ve got a few minutes, let’s try them … gave them exercise. We went over the exercise and then I said, ‘Let’s give this spec to ChatGPT and see what it does.’ And we were able to compare what it did, with what my students did, with what I did and say, ‘This was great, this was not so great. Where was the problem? Was it our specification, was it our understanding to do something better?’ And I think that somehow, somehow I should do this more and we will figure it out. But it’s not obvious, not at all. And I don’t believe for a moment that the need for programmers is going to disappear. Someone said within the last two months or so, ‘As soon as clients can specify things clearly, there will be no need for programmers.’ Okay, we’re safe. Right? Like anyone who’s worked in software knows. Right. It’s clear, but … we’ll see where this goes.

Brian (27:59): Yeah, I completely agree. One of the things that … of all the concerns about things like ChatGPT, the thing that worries me the most is it being wrong and eloquent while being wrong.

Reuven (28:12): Someone called it mansplaining as a service, which I love.

Brian (28:16): Well, just the fact … because I’ve experienced it, it kind of gets into your brain as, ‘Oh, well, this sounds well written and clearly explained. There must be some truth to it.’ But there are pieces of it that are just flatly wrong, and just as much in code as in natural language.

Reuven (28:37): Absolutely.

Brian (28:39): So, we’re coming up on time. I think it’s been a great conversation. I don’t believe we have any other questions in the Q&A. I have a couple of things that have come to mind, but we can let them pass.

Dhavide (28:56): I’m happy to hang on for another five minutes or so, or ten minutes. I’m quite enjoying this.

Brian (29:02): Okay, so I think one of the things I’ve experienced … I’ve … hobbyist, open source hobbyist, and I’ve done a little bit of code for various pieces of my job. And the experience of hobby code versus work code, the different constraints, the different pace of work is just a different experience. Have either of you and so I guess, Dhavide, with your education, your professor background, do either of you have context on just explaining things to friends or family members? Have you tried to help someone … train someone in a casual way? And has that experience been different than your professional training work?

Dhavide (29:53): I think I’ve done a little occasional kind of Pandas style … showing how to someone asking me how to do something in Excel and working with … and I’ve sort of got … sort of turning this into a Pandas thing, mostly because that’s how I know how to do it. And my Excel-fu is not all that great. So I have had to do that for family members. And sometimes that leads into, well, here’s, downloading Anaconda so you can put this on your laptop. Kind of like … it can go that direction. Right.

And certainly those are I mean, they’re fun because usually these are people I have a personal relationship with, and it’s kind of enjoyable. So I use a lot of the same trick stuff, right? Like let them be on the keyboard, and try and make sure I stay back and try and not be looming over them and trying to … and dominating … and making sure that they’re actually figuring out to do it. So some of those things actually tie into my experience in professional teaching. But the stakes around it, I think, are slightly different because it is actually someone with whom I have a personal relationship. So, that’s my comment on this. I don’t know about. Reuven, what’s your take?

Reuven (31:30): Okay, so first, one of the smartest things I ever said or did, was when we bought our apartment, I guess it was like, 23, 24 years ago, and our neighbors … there are, like, eight apartments to our building. Our neighbors sort of came to say ‘hi’ and welcome us, and one of them said, ‘Hey, I hear that you’re a computer person. Could I come to you with any problems?’ I said, ‘I am super happy to help you. Just one little caveat. I only know Unix. I don’t know anything about Windows.’ 25 years. No questions from neighbors. The best.

The thing is, I’ve definitely been accused by family members when asking technical questions, of switching into trainer mode, that I have, like, one way of explaining things, and I sort of turn on that persona, for good and for bad. I haven’t really done it that much with my family members. They tend not to be interested at all in what I’m doing except for one daughter, who is, but prefers to do it on her own, although gaining some appreciation for what I do.

I don’t know. I feel like it’s different, and it’s not because of the personal versus sort of professional things that we’re doing. I think it’s just the relationship … that there’s definitely a different kind of relationship between a teacher and a student in a classroom or instructor in a student classroom, and that … even though in Israel, everything’s super, super informal, there still is that little bit of distance that helps you to be more authoritative. And when you do that with your family, you just come off like a jerk. And I’ll say also, again, in Israel, it’s super informal. Sometimes I’ll go to lunch with my students between the morning and afternoon sessions, and yet when we go back in the classroom, there’s still a sense of, ‘Okay, you’re the expert. We’re going to defer to you,’ which is harder to pull off among friends. That said, I often tell friends, family, whatever, ‘if you are using Python, call me. I’m happy to help out.’ And sometimes they do. Sometimes they do.

Brian (33:40): You want to retain a non-professional relationship with your friends and family after you’re done telling them what they need to know, and that … you can’t completely switch over to professional mode without it there being friction between those kind of two relational bearings, I suppose.

Reuven (33:59): Yes.

Brian (34:02): What is your experience with lunching with students, Dhavide? Have you had that experience where classes kind of socialize in between sessions?

Dhavide (34:16): Yeah, I’ve had that with some of my professional training, and … sometimes it’s a little tense, I will say. You know, there are times where because, … you know, there are times when I’ve been, like, at a company, and, you know, the conversation at lunch kind of naturally devolved into US politics. And, you know, and I’m Canadian. I’m not, you know, … I’m an outsider in numerous senses. But then, also, it’s like … this is very dangerous. I’m here representing Anaconda or Quansight or whoever, and so I want to be very careful. I’m just going to keep my mouth shut and listen. But then sometimes they’re asking me for my opinion, like as a Canadian, what do you think? And it’s like, okay, so that’s a little bit tense.

But, on the other hand, I think it’s kind of nice because it means that we’ve kind of got a good … Reuven was mentioning about relationships. So it’s kind of nice that they’re feeling comfortable enough around me that they want to ask me. And so when they ask, maybe I might weigh in. But I’m very cautious about doing that, because I don’t want to do anything that’s going to be deemed unprofessional or damaging of the professional relationship.

But, for the most part … and I guess then … can also get into places where even if it’s not even about something like politics, but if they’re talking about trends in technology and my opinions about certain technologies and certain projects, products right? There, I also have to be a little bit careful as well, because I kind of think, okay, am I going to say anything here that’s going to get me in trouble? Right? But I can offer opinions about, I don’t know, vi versus Emacs or something, you know, ridiculous like that, right? I, you know … I will offer opinions about, you know, given tools for my own and then say things like around my own usage experience, and and that’s as strong as I’ll do it. But I, again, I have to be careful that I’m doing things in a … it’s a habit that I got even back from my academic days. Right? Before I write an email, I always think, okay, if this email is brought up in court, right? [inaudible]

Brian (36:48): Yeah. So a good sign that you’re making the personal connections, but challenging to navigate.

Dhavide (36:54): Yeah.

Reuven (36:56): I’ll add, by the way, that I used to have lunch with my students much more … and I’m ignoring the fact that now so much of it is online … just because I need a break. I need a break from talking. And inevitably, during lunch, they want to ask me questions. And it could just be personal questions, right? In fact, the two questions that people love to ask are, ‘So what’s it like being self employed?’ And, ‘How is our cafeteria compared to the others?’ Like everyone, everyone always asks those two questions, and then they’ll sometimes throw in the political one and boy oh boy, no one guesses my politics. It’s great fun, except I am not going to volunteer unless they ask. But if they ask, they’ll get what they paid for, as it were.

But really, even in a social situation, sometimes I’ll back out and I’ll say, I’m just going to eat by myself. I have a meeting, I have this, I have that. And then I can save my voice and have a little bit of downtime during the day, because it is a lot of work to just sort of talk and talk and talk all day.

Brian (37:56): Yeah, that would be another … so again, I want to be respectful of your time. That would be another topic that I’d be interested in is, how do you prepare and then how do you unwind after a day of training? Are you introvert or extroverted, both of you? Does the training energize or is it tiring and then you need recovery?

Reuven (38:16): I’m totally energized. My wife is like, ‘I don’t understand. You just talk for 8 hours. How can you have this much energy?’ I’m like, ‘Because I love what I do,’ but I can easily imagine easily, easily imagine going the other way.

Dhavide (38:29): Usually. I mean, I’m energized when I’m teaching something and I’m prepared and I’m enjoying it. If things are going south for technical reasons or whatever, then that is more stressful. But I think invariably at the end of the day, if I’ve done a full day’s training, I’ve lost my voice pretty much. And so I definitely need to unwind after that. And I can’t talk to anyone after that. So I need to just give my voice a chance to rest. I often have, like, I go through a whole packet of lozenges usually during a day of teaching, just because I’m trying to make sure that I’m … and making sure that I’m hydrated, drinking lots of water and things like that.

But it is fun. I do love teaching. I think the wonderful thing about teaching, as I’ve said numerous times, is, in my mind, I think it addresses the fundamental problem of human existence. The fundamental problem of human existence is in some sense that we’re all trapped inside our own heads, and we have our own thoughts and feelings and we observe everything else going around, but we don’t really know what’s going on inside other people’s heads. And when you’re teaching, what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to deconstruct a conceptual understanding of something you have in your own head and rebuild that in someone else’s. And thereby doing that sort of … mitigating against that fundamental problem of human existence. And I find it very enjoyable and fun when you see someone get it. And again, I taught math and computing for years and these are things that a lot of people really hate because they struggle with it. So if you help them realize, ‘Oh, it actually ain’t that bad, you have all of the tools to do this and you can figure this out.’ That’s a very gratifying experience.

Brian (40:29): Yeah. Remember, students, that your teachers are, your instructors are people too, and… help them help you, be kind to them, all that sort of thing. So I think … we’re ten minutes past the half hour. Let’s go ahead and wrap it here. Dhavide, Reuven, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your insights. We really appreciate you coming on the event today. Any last words, or ready to wrap.

Dhavide (41:02): I guess… So, thank you very much, Brian. And for those of you listening who … just remember to try and, as we said, it’s all about communication and building shared understanding. So, thinking about who you’re with and thinking about the other person is a really core part of this. Keep that in mind. I think.

Reuven (41:28): Ditto sounds great and I also really enjoyed this. Hopefully we’ll do it again real soon.

Brian (41:33): We’ll keep it … we’ll check the schedule and we can absolutely do it. Looking forward to it. So again, thank you very much everyone for attending. OpenTeams … check us out at openteams.com, and look into … if you, if you wish, the OSA Community at openteams.com/osa-community.. Have a good rest of your day and we’ll see you at a future event. Thank you.