Living Museum of Learning
Her Questions Chased Me Downstairs
Two weeks ago, Tianjing had just begun learning iOS programming.
Xcode was still an enormous unfamiliar world: class, func, { }, let, UIBezierPath, CGPoint, CGFloat...
And on her very first day, her questions chased me downstairs into the gym.
I answered questions in WhatsApp.
I reconnected with her in Slack.
At one point, I even left the gym and went upstairs to huddle with her in Slack again.
😂
Since then, she had gone through two weeks of very different learning.
She had drawn geometric shapes, made her cute color house, forgotten it, rediscovered it, and learned and forgotten plenty of syntax along the way.
Now we started a brand-new iOS project:
Gomoku.
Before touching Xcode, Tianjing drew a Gomoku board with some pieces by hand, reconstructing the game from memory.
Then she opened the new project.
Her homework was simple:
Draw the Gomoku game board and center it on the gray view.
Before the end of class, I asked:
“You have the empty gray view here, and you see the print worked inside `GomokuView. You don't need any help to draw the game board, right?”
“Yes.”
She was confident.
Then she asked a very good question:
“Are width and height for the gray view or the outer white view?”
We checked.
The gray view was approximately:
992 × 994
I knew she hadn't touched Xcode for a few days, so I didn't want to make the homework unnecessarily intimidating.
I checked the clock. I still had a little time before going to badminton with Cindy.
So I said:
“Maybe we can stop the class after you draw a single line.”
Before we said goodbye, she did exactly that.
One line.
That was enough.
I also told her:
“After class, if you're brave and confident enough, go back to the Main Storyboard and make the gray view a little more rectangular. Then you can check whether your centering works in both directions. Otherwise, just use the current 992 × 994.”
Then I left.
The next thing I saw was not one line.
It was a beautiful 17 × 17 Gomoku grid, perfectly centered on the iPad simulator, with square cells.
She had chosen the brave option.
She had gone back into the Main Storyboard.
She had adjusted the gray view.
She had figured out the geometry.
And she had done it without bothering me.
Not once.
No WhatsApp question.
No Slack rescue.
No:
“Donald, what should I do now?”
Just the finished work.
And, in classic Tianjing fashion, she forgot to send the code again. 😂
But the screenshot said everything.
The most important change wasn't that Tianjing learned how to draw a Gomoku board.
It was what happened to the teacher's role.
Two weeks ago:
Her questions chased me downstairs into the gym.
Today:
She didn't bother me for a single second.
The homework was deliberately made smaller because she hadn't touched Xcode for several days.
Just draw one line.
She did.
That tiny success was enough to reopen the door.
Then she walked through it herself.
She didn't need to be pushed toward the whole board.
She simply kept going.
A learner's independence sometimes appears very quietly.
Not in a test score.
Not in a new syntax keyword.
Sometimes it looks like this:
The teacher says, “One line is enough.”
And the learner comes back with the whole board. 🌱