Let’s get one thing out of the way right away: I love teaching.
I love seeing that “Ah-ha!” moment in a student’s eyes when they suddenly understand a concept. I also believe that in-person events are the best way to see that moment. It’s magical. As this post goes live, I’m welcoming a bunch of folks to Catalyst Ranch for my performance tuning class, and I’m totally excited to show them all kinds of cool stuff.
However, in-person classes have a few drawbacks.
Things can go horribly awry in-person. There was that time all the meals were delayed due to a kitchen problem. The time the WiFi went down. The attendee with irritable bowels. The attendee with no sense of personal space. The attendee with the broken arm – oh wait, that was me.
When I’m on the road, I miss home. At the end of a long day of training, you come home to…a hotel room. And as nice as hotel rooms can be, they’re not as nice as home. I miss my bed, my pillow, my couch, my favorite restaurants, Ernie, and of course, Erika. Even though I’m able to do that stuff when I teach in Chicago, I hear from students that they miss home, too, and life doesn’t always let them attend classes out of town.
I love travel, but when it sucks, it really sucks. Travel is the most fun for me when I can arrive early, spend a few days relaxing and enjoying my destination, and then rolling up my sleeves to get some work done. (My recent Isle of Man trip was a good example of that.) In situations like that, if there’s a delay, who cares? Enjoy the ride. But that’s harder to do if I need to frequently jet around from one class to the next client. Travel sucks for the students, too – I’ve had students outright miss classes due to flight problems, visa issues, and even weather.
Online classes have gotten really powerful. For example, I record the classes, and attendees get to watch replays. I tried doing that with in-person classes, and it was just way too much work to capture good audio and camera angles. Another one is cloud labs – since each student has their own Internet connection, we don’t have to worry about slow connections to their cloud VMs.
I realized something during my last retreat.
When I did my last career planning retreat in May, I thought a lot about what’s important to me, and what I enjoy. When I force myself to disconnect, answer specific questions, and make lists of things, I have a lot of surprising realizations.
One of the big realizations this year was that I wanna:
- Spend more time teaching
- Spend less time traveling
- But when I do travel, spend more time on vacations (which I think of as retirement practice)
So even though it’s a profitable business, I’m going to take a year off the in-person training classes for 2018 and focus on something new.
I’ll still do conference pre-cons, but only when the conference is in a place that I wanna go, and when the timing works out that I can get there a few days early and enjoy myself. I’m looking forward to Summit next week, and SQLBits 2018 is another great example. I’ve already booked my tickets for the Ferrari exhibit at the nearby Design Museum for the Monday before Bits, and you’re welcome to join me. Shoot me an email if you’d like to tag along.
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If I get selected to speak at SQLBits, I’ll definitely join you at the Ferrari exhibit!
First as always thank you for sharing thought process and ideas with all of us out in the community. I always enjoy these posts and after years of reading your thought process posts I feel like I had to play devils advocate here since I feel like something is missing. 🙂 .
You didn’t tell us any of the Pro’s to in person trainings? What was the counterbalance to your argument here that you need to take the break? Did you have one? I can’t imagine you did not. Did you have a reason for not sharing it?
Guess I’m just curious as it feel like you left something out. 🙂
For the record I respect the decision and would agree with taking some time off and adjusting as needed. I put down a camera for a whole year for the same reason even though it was a core passion of mine.
pat
Oh great question! There were two pros: I think the experience is better (both for instructors and attendees) in in-person training. There’s a huge benefit to me being able to see the students, look someone in the eyes, and say, “I think you’ve got a question – go for it.” Second, … money, hahaha. You can make money doing in-person training (although there’s a risk to it, and the profit percentage isn’t as high as online training.)
I hear you, my friend. Lately I’ve done multiple 6-week, back-to-back, around-the-world teaching trips and they take a massive toll, in body, mind and spirit. I too LOVE teaching, and I’m quite comfortable on-line. In fact, at the University of Washington I’ve taught in-person, online, and hybrid (one week in person, one week online) courses. We measured the effectiveness of each modality, and what we found was interesting:
We found that some people can be taught some material by some instructors online. 🙂
We found that the effectiveness of online is directly due to how the course was structured, the exercises and modality of reinforcement methods, and the dedication of the students. For in-class, we found that many students were used to that format, and it allowed them to “hide” better – we found less than 50% of the students are truly engaged in class.
So take that break. You need it. It’s exhausting to travel and teach, and being away from home is tough, especially with a great one.
Buck – hahaha, yeah, but remember that the same thing holds true for in-person: SOME people can be taught SOME material by SOME instructors in-person. 😀
Hope to catch up with you again soon, man!
I thought your online Sr DBA class was great. I am a huge fan of not traveling to places so for me it works out perfectly.
Justin – thanks sir! Good to have you in class.
You know, I love to travel. Spending 12 out of 14 weeks on the road last summer made travel a lot less sexy. I hear you.
Mike – yeah, bingo. There’s parts of it that I still really love, but I can get those parts by traveling to clients or on vacations with Erika & the family.
Sound like a good decision. For me, I love teaching, and I love travelling. And I like combining both. I’m writing these words from the pool in a luxury hotel in Samui, Thailand. I spent last week teaching class to a customer in Bangkok, and this week my wife joined me for a vacation in Samui. I really love these opportunities to combine business and pleasure in all kinds of locations around the world. Maybe I’ll get to that year-off point in my career sometime, but I’m not there yet. Still enjoying it too much.
Anyway, enjoy this year. You’re doing a great job with the online training. Hope to see you again soon.
Guy – thanks sir! Yeah, bringing the family along makes it way more fun. Unfortunately, we’ve also got a little 14-year-old dog that makes traveling tougher. (sigh) A lot of the places we wanna go, won’t accept dogs. Erika can’t bring herself to travel without Ernie these days! (Strangely, she’s already making vacation travel plans for when Ernie passes away, hahaha.)