Spreading Python at my hometown

Posted on April 22, 2026

On Jan 31, 2026, I gave an online talk about how I taught Python to my hometown.

The town of Agoo is small. It is found at La Union, Philippines.

To summarize the video,

I've started teaching College at 2011.
I've just started my teaching career as I just got my Masters in Information Technology degree.
I was the first one to teach Python at our town (and probably the region, but this is only anecdotal as my students told me this).
The students, at first, thought that Python is advanced. Their friends in other schools said they will have a hard time
After a week of teaching, my students are more knowledgeable than their friends at other schools.
After a month, my students are "more advanced" than the first year graduates at other schools.
After one semester, I've heard that the other schools started to teach Python as well.
I've known about the above, because my students told me. Also, it is a small town.
I brought my students to the first Pycon Philippines.

Things that I took out of my talk for time reasons:

I'm a programmer first, then a teacher. I was able to teach the entire IT college as I am familiar with all the subjects.
Some of my students transferred to other schools after their first semester. They told me later that they wished they could go back to my class.
Some of my students transferred after a year. They told me that they were the ones teaching the class. ....I am both proud of them ...and sad at the state of programming classes.
One of my students gave a pygame lightning talk on the second PyCon Philippines.
I used Python to make my quiz and exams. This is to allow me to randomize the questions and make it harder to cheat.
One of the most frustrating part of teaching is the cheating mindset. I had a student copy their neighbor... except I setup all the questions to be different.
I taught Turtle to my students to have them recognize that code is run line-by-line and that previous code have a major effect. I didn't see Turtle as a major programming topic, so I didn't put it in the exams. Well, turns out the students love Turtle so much, they thought I would add the library to the exam. Oops.
I was hoping that my students would pay it forward, but it seems that most of them didn't become programmers.
The school have closed as the country was transitioning to K-12.
I still teach Python at schools, but in workshops and not as a teacher.

The one thing that I wish I could put up are more pictures of my students. I have their pictures, but I can't get their permission in time.