William Holcomb
1525 Newton Street NW
Washington, DC 20010

General Assembly
1133 15ᵗʰ Street NW, 8ᵗʰ Floor
Washington, DC 20005

Dear Hiring Manager,

I recently attended the Next-Tech Hiring Fair, and a representative from 1776 recommended that I check out your organization for possible employment. I would like to apply for the Part Time Backend Web Development Instructor.

I have had a variety of teaching experiences. During my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I was a Cisco Networking Instructor with a cohort of about a dozen people. At the same time I taught an English class where, as the course progressed, the dynamic developed into an environment where the students were all regularly participating and comfortable expressing themselves.

Later, as part of subsidizing my Masters degree, I delivered a series of lectures on technology and American society for a group of Malaysian undergrads. I enjoyed drawing diverse topics into narratives to allow them to contextualize aspects of the world they experienced in terms of ongoing processes involving various actors with different goals and concerns.

More recently, I spent about a month pair programming in Rails with a new developer. It was very edifying to be able to fill in his comprehension of how different aspects of the system interact to produce the results we would see as we progressed.

I've found project-based learning orders of magnitude more effective than simple theory. We frequently used binding.pry to open an interactive debugger at an appropriate place in the executing code. I would question him as to his expectations with hints as to how to query the system to verify if those expectations were being met.

I've been doing Rails for about five years and my understanding of the basic components is sufficient that I was generally able to help him understand the why of what he saw. In general, I try to integrate experience with a comprehensible narrative so that pupils discern the reasons for their results.

For additional information, please see my résumé at http://cv.himinbi.org or contact me at will@dhappy.org. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to hearing from you.