My First Year Teaching (as a fresh engineering grad)

I don't think I've mentioned this much publicly, but about a year ago, I became a teacher.

Last summer I was cold messaging strangers in homeschool Facebook groups trying to find families willing to beta test Asobo. That was the whole plan - get real families, real students, and real feedback on what we were building. Eventually I connected with two parents who were willing to talk, and pretty quickly I realized the conversation was part product feedback and part job interview.

They had been looking for a tech teacher. Between my background in engineering, tutoring, coding, and education, it turned out to be a surprisingly good fit. So I said yes.

At first it felt like a side quest. I was building an education company, and teaching a few classes seemed like a useful way to stay close to students and learn faster. I had tutored for years, so I figured I knew what I was getting into. I did not. Last semester I taught two classes. Now I teach five.

The school is technically a private school, but really it's a community of homeschool families. More than a hundred kids come together a few days a week for classes they cannot easily do at home. Some students are years ahead. Some have barely touched a keyboard. Most are somewhere you would never guess from looking at them.

Almost immediately, I learned something that changed how I think about education: most of teaching is not the content.

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The Subject Was the Easy Part

I came in thinking my edge was technical. I had an engineering background from NC State, years of tutoring experience, and I knew the material well. The technical part turned out to be the easy part.

The harder part was everything around the lesson. Getting thirty students onto the same website, at the same time, on devices that actually work. Someone forgets their charger. Someone else forgets their laptop. One student is ten minutes ahead, another is completely frozen, three are asking questions at once, and one is pretending to be fine but is quietly lost.

That is the real work. Holding a room together long enough for learning to happen is the actual skill, and no amount of research papers or educator interviews fully prepares you for it. You have to be in it.

Being in it also teaches you things you cannot learn anywhere else. You learn what a student looks like when they are genuinely stuck versus just bored. You learn that a tool that looks great in a demo can fall apart on a Chromebook on a Tuesday morning. You learn that motivation is fragile, that classroom energy matters, and that a student's confidence can completely change the way they engage with a subject. And you learn pretty fast that trust has to come before instruction, or the instruction does not land.

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The Older Cousin Thing

One advantage I did not expect was being young.

I am only about ten years older than most of my students, and I grew up online. I don't really know a world without the internet, so when a student references something from TikTok or makes a joke that would fly over most adults' heads, I am usually already there. They picked up on that fast.

They call me "unc." I'm 23. But somehow it works. I ended up in this older-cousin role - close enough to actually talk to, old enough to still be the adult in the room.

What I learned is that the fastest way into that trust was not a lesson. It was showing up as a real person. Playing freeze tag at lunch. Getting talked into the limbo line at a school dance while a crowd of twelve-year-olds cheered me on. Laughing with them, taking their ideas seriously, letting them see that I actually liked being there. That kind of trust follows you straight back into the classroom.

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The Moment That Stuck With Me

One of my students had a really hard first day. New school, new people, new everything, and it was too much all at once. She ended up in the hallway trying to hold it together.

Honestly, I was new too. So I told her that. I said it was my first day as well and that we were kind of figuring it out together. I did not push her to come back in right away. I let her breathe for a few minutes before she rejoined the class, and after it ended she stayed back just to talk for a bit.

At the end of the year, that same student told me I was her favorite teacher. She gave me a card and a jar of handwritten affirmations. She is in three of my classes now. And later, a parent came up and told me she thought I was going to be that teacher for her kid - the one who listened, the one they were excited to see, the one they carry with them. I almost teared up right there.

When I first started building Asobo, I thought a lot about helping students learn in the abstract. Skill gaps, feedback loops, personalization, practice. I don't think I fully understood what it meant to actually be there for a student until I was.

Now I do.

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What It Changed About Asobo

What started as a side quest became something I genuinely care about. And it has shifted how I think about what we are building.

There are incredible educators who deeply understand students, but most do not have the time, training, or resources to build technical products. There are also great engineers who can build almost anything, but many have never managed a real classroom full of real kids on real devices with real constraints. That gap matters, and I think living in both worlds is one of Asobo's biggest advantages.

We are not building for the perfect demo environment. We are building for the messy classroom - the student who is stuck but too embarrassed to say so, the teacher who has six things happening at once, the device that barely loads, the kid who needs a confidence boost before they need another explanation. That is the world education technology actually has to work in.

I was looking for beta testers. I found a classroom. And it might be one of the best things that has happened to Asobo, and honestly, to me.

Best, Austin Ketola