Mondays used to suck. Now they are a circus-- chaotic, unpredictable, and occasionally magical. Every week, I volunteer at the Greenwich Boys and Girls Club, running Kids Teaching Code with my friend Zach. The title sounds more official than it is: managing a handful of 10-year-olds working on Scratch while they sneak in Geometry Dash. Somewhere in this chaos, and this coding, I have found purpose and it is not some corny mission to shape the “next generation of thinkers and engineers.”
The kids exist on a spectrum of brilliance. There is the prodigy-- I call him “The Fourier of the Fourth Grade,” after the brilliant mathematician-- who builds games with precise movement and projectile systems, while his peers struggle to move a sprite across the screen. His hands fly across the touchpad like a violin master’s bow, creating walls of code. Then there is the artist who would rather design a glittery cat than debug a loop. The ex-skeptic who announced, “I hate coding,” only to return shouting, “Finally, it’s coding time!” And, the Geometry Dash devils, who treat my sessions as a VPN to bypass gaming blocks.
Teaching here is less instruction and more diplomacy. One aspiring developer demands we recreate AAA titles, another argues that 100 projectiles per second is “fair” for his invasion game. “You can’t win his game?” a girl teases when I struggle with another student's maze. “This is called rigorous playtesting,” I counter. “I’m searching for bugs.” These kids don’t seem to realize just how challenging their “simple” games are - or how to be polite to the old man in the room. Their audacity is endless and refreshing. They don’t care about my ego--they only want me as duct tape for their next “project.”
The Fourier student is my mirror: independent, allergic to collaboration, convinced he is the smartest person in the room (he might be). I watch him dissect problems with surgical precision, and I wish I could fast-forward him past Scratch’s limitations. “When can I learn actual programming?” he asks. When your hands can reach the semicolon key and your ego has subsided, I think. Instead, I say, “That game looks mighty unfinished for someone who wants to be a senior dev.”
Others ask, “How do I make Fortnite or Roblox?” as if I could teach Unreal Engine or memory management or web security. They are still brilliant, just not in a way that fits a Scratch window. One girl, after weeks of resistance, finally built a game instead of a scene. It’s filled with pink bubbles and clouds, activated by just one button. It is absurd. It is art. It’s not challenging but it doesn’t have to be if you have fun.
The parking lot is purgatory-- blazing minivans and double-parked cars-- but inside, we are building worlds. Some kids speak in logic—thinking through code blocks–, others prefer vision, becoming “project leads” without knowing how. I have learned that “teaching code” isn’t about those blocks we place, it is about giving kids a medium to transform curiosity and imagination into a creation, whether it is a potato singing Taylor Swift or a dinosaur shooting lasers.
When I started, I thought Monday would be about sacrifice--giving up time to “shape young minds.” Now I know better. The kids aren’t clay to be molded; they are volcanos. My job isn’t to direct them, but to dodge the incoming debris and cheer when their sizzling lava hits the ocean, creating something new. Who knows, maybe their next eruption will be as magnificent as Hawaii.
As I pack up each week, the skeptic lingers, “Will you be here next week?” I nod, because who else will help monsters shoot fireballs? Mondays still suck - the long school day, the sleep deprivation, homework for that night - but now they have their silver lining.