Why do we need teachers? We have all the books

A few days into my first JavaScript class, I decided I didn’t need school anymore. I read the book from beginning to end. I completed every single exercise. I ran the code on all projects. It worked. I went on to build my own website and applied the things I learned from the book. We still had 2 months of class to go through.

So I went to class to find my struggling peers, and offered to tutor them for $10 a head per session. It was lucrative. In fact, the teacher directed all questions she couldn't answer to me.

I aced this class and even made money along the way. So what was the point of going to class if I could just get the books? For my next class, I got the thick Apress book about C# and tried to repeat the same. This book had 900+ pages on building an e-commerce site for, of all things, balloon shops.

My first roadblock was at chapter one. None of it made sense. I reread it, but the logic refused to click. I thought maybe the best way to approach it was to follow along the balloon shop project hoping it clicks eventually.

In my first class, I learned HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These were easy enough to pick up. With the balloon shop project, I was to approach it as a business, and the language threw me off. It mentioned business rules, application logic, and databases. These were not things I was familiar with.

I had to attend class to try to get my questions answered. Unfortunately, the teacher, the same from the first class, was useless at explaining these e-commerce concepts. I passed the class by following instructions, and copying and pasting code. I never understood anything.

This got me thinking about some of the students I tutored. They weren't interested in learning JavaScript. I explained and explained the code, and then asked if they had any questions. They always repeat the same thing: so can I copy your code to see if it works? They had paid $10 for the code, not to hear me blab. Where did the learning fail? Was I just as ineffective as the teacher I’d dismissed?

As far as the school was concerned, I was an excellent student. I passed both classes with As. However, I had mastered client side programming in one class, and failed to grasp anything useful in backend programming. Then came the third class—the one I dropped halfway through. Too broke to buy the book, I almost skipped it entirely. Yet it became the game changer. The professor was a former Texas Instrument engineer that worked on calculators in the 90s. On the first day, he brought the calculator to class and shared the type of code that ran on the device. It was beautiful. A student raised his hand and asked if it was going to be on the test. The instructor laughed, “that’s not even in the book.”

For the few classes I attended, I absorbed every single thing the instructor said and used the motivation to find myself a job in this world of programming.

When I’m asked which book I recommend for new programmers, I really want to recommend the JavaScript book I learned from, last published in 2009. But it’s obsolete now. When I’m asked if it’s important to go to school to learn programming, I think of my JavaScript teacher and the immediate answer is No. But then I remember the Texas Instrument engineer, and it’s a resounding yes.

So what was the point of class if I could just get the books? By that logic, we’d all learn through hypnopedia. Plug in a JavaScript audiobook while we sleep and wake up programmers. But the balloon shop book proved otherwise: without context, even 900 pages might as well be static.

In the end, the answer isn’t in the books or the teachers alone, but in the space between them. My JavaScript book taught me syntax, but it was the act of tutoring peers, of stumbling through explanations, of watching them care more about working code than understanding. That’s what showed me how much teaching relies on curiosity, not just clarity. The C# book drowned me in business logic, but the real lesson was how little a 900-page manual matters when the language of instruction feels alien. And that Texas Instruments engineer? He never handed me a book. He handed me a why: a reason to care about the craft beyond passing tests or copying code.

Maybe learning is less about the tools we use and more about the lenses we’re given to see through. Books are static, finite, bound by their last updates. Teachers, at their best, are living bridges between knowledge and meaning. They don’t just explain loops or databases, they show you how to ask better questions. How to sit with confusion until it clicks, how to turn “I don’t get it” into “What if I try…?”

I still don’t know if I was a bad teacher to those students who paid for answers. But I do know this: the classes that stuck weren’t the ones where I aced the exams. They were the ones where someone made the work feel alive, where code stopped being symbols on a screen and became a way to solve puzzles, build worlds, even resurrect calculators from the 90s.

So why do we need teachers when we have books? For the same reason we need both maps and guides: one shows you the terrain, the other teaches you how to walk it.

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