The Interview

Lauren Robinson: Let’s talk about how teaching informs our work here and how our work here informs our teaching… a bit about how all that comes together in a beautiful synergy. ﻿Zuzanna Blasco: Perfect! ﻿L: So, Zuzanna, what do you do here at Newfold and what kind of teaching do you do?  Z: I am an engineer team lead. I do the front-end content and I also work behind the scenes on all of the new AI tools and other online growth tools. And then outside I am a teacher for Arizona State University, a professor at the ASU Polytechnic campus. I teach two separate classes in each semester, so I usually teach a beginners Illustrator and Photoshop class. That's like for newbies who have never touched Illustrator or Photoshop; and later in the semester I teach a master's-level user experience eCommerce class, which has everything to do with what I do here. So it's all about getting a website started for a company and getting going from there doing marketing, SEO, all of that good stuff. ﻿L: That's awesome. What I do is kind of similar. I do the the marketing copywriting for a lot of our go-to-market brands, and the stuff I write ends up going through you before people get to see it. As far as my teaching goes, I teach at both the University of North Florida and Florida State College at Jacksonville. I teach anything from first year writing classes, which is something that everybody has to take… to 2- and 300-level technical writing classes, which I’ve been teaching for six or seven years. ﻿When they first offered the course to me, I said, “Why? Why? Why am I teaching technical writing? My degree is in creative writing and I'm a very creative kind of person.” But then the chair of the department looked at me and she was like, “Lauren, you work for a tech company.” ﻿I'm like, “Oh, you're right, I do, don't I?” So I got that class and they're going to have to pry that course out of my cold, dead hands. I love teaching technical writing so much because it's the practical stuff that everybody needs to use as a tool to get the stuff they know across to other people. ﻿And I don't know about you, but when you're in a teaching kind of situation, you're the boss in that room, you know? But then I'm not the boss here… But teaching has trained my thinking to recognize that everybody's perspective on a problem or an issue is valid. My students notice things in their peers’ work that I wouldn’t necessarily see—and it flips a switch in their brains. “Oh, so the teacher isn’t always the one that knows everything.” And it’s just like that here. When we’re working on a team, everyone’s perspective should be validated. ﻿Z: Yeah, yeah. Being a teacher sort of puts me in my place to see different perspectives because it gets me thinking about different questions that I would have never asked just because I started out so early on Photoshop tools. I started learning Illustrator and Photoshop when I was in middle school, but I was learning it through YouTube tutorials. ﻿So the questions that I get on a daily basis about UX and like Photoshop really humble me because I'm like, “Oh yeah, that's a really good question.” Things I wouldn’t think to ask, or just different methods of doing things. ﻿Being a teacher opens up my gateways of knowledge and it really helps me understand what someone who might be 50 years old going through a class for the first time versus someone who's 18 and they're just starting college. 

So I get to see the whole spectrum of life, and I get to see their personal lives, too. A lot of them are military students or “Starbucks students” trying to get their degrees while working. ﻿L: You just hit on something that I think is missing from a lot of educators that don't have a job in industry. Real world stuff happens. When my students come to me saying that something happened in their lives and they’ll need to turn something in late, I say, “Okay, get it to me when you can.” They always look so shocked and surprised. Too many professors will just say, “Nope. You missed this.” And that’s just not fair. ﻿We all need a little grace sometimes. I see it here at Newfold with my team. People are more than the function that they serve in their jobs. ﻿Somebody who might be making my job more difficult might be having a difficult time outside of work which is affecting how they work… and that’s just life. ﻿Z: Yeah, I agree with you because you're putting humanity back into teaching because they're so concerned about that grade—that final grade. They're more than just a GPA, and I think that's something that I I have to remind the people all the time. It’s okay to struggle—just learn it and turn it in later. I just want to get the information across. ﻿L: One thing I say to my students all the time is, “What do they call the guy who graduated last in his class at medical school? …Doctor.” The grade doesn’t matter. ﻿And it's funny because they're all so focused on the grade, but when was the last time anybody asked you what your GPA was? ﻿Z: No, never. I could have been out having the best time of my life and still passed my classes. It would have been fine! ﻿L: We all thought the number was going to matter at some point, and it never did. ﻿Z: What is your class setting like? It sounds like your class setting is a little bit different than mine. How many students do you have and what’s your day to day? ﻿L: About half of my classes are completely online, and they're asynchronous, meaning I have a lot of front loading that I have to do setting up the course. But once it starts, I’m basically just there to answer questions and grade. That's my least favorite way to teach, but it’s also the easiest for me to do and balance with work. ﻿Then the other two classes I do teach in person, and I was not an early morning class taker when I was in college, but because of work I am an early morning class teacher. My classes this semester start at 7:15am. It’s not bad—but when that alarm goes off, I’m like, “Ohh no…” It’s one thing to be awake and sit in front of a computer at home and do my work in sweatpants, and it’s another thing to be awake and have to be the person standing in front of the room running things. ﻿What about you? ﻿ Z: I'm 100% online. So some of the students are in person, but they do take these online classes whenever they can't fit in all of these things into their schedule. Some of these things are only offered online because that's how you would learn them anyway. For example, the user experience eCommerce class—you would do everything online anyway. ﻿I do all of my classes virtually and what we do is we have like office hours and I just have Slack open. ﻿Whenever I do grading, I just leave comments for them and they can come back to me because the hard part about this is that every single thing has to be graded and everything has to be double checked. ﻿I have to open each Photoshop file, open each Illustrator file, make sure it wasn't copied over from something, make sure that they're not using AI to cheat and stuff… The eCommerce one is a little bit easier because they really have to choose a specific website that they want to redesign for a company, and they have to go through it and they have to explain every single thing. ﻿So it's a little bit easier, but the Photoshop and Illustrator one with the tools that are available to the people now, it's easy to get away with things. ﻿L: And it's such a bummer, you know, because when I'm grading writing, I have to check. Did they use AI for this? Did they plagiarize this? It’s wild. ﻿I haven't run into it yet, but one of my colleagues noticed that four or five of her students all turned in at thing that wasn't quite exactly the same, but it was similar enough and she ran her prompt through an AI writer and, lo and behold—same results. ﻿That’s just rough because it's not about the project you turn in or getting things in on time. It's about learning the material. If you're using AI to prove that you've learned the material, then did you really learn the material? Why would they cheat themselves out of the experience? ﻿Z: What is the worst excuse you've ever gotten to get out of something? ﻿L: I’ll speak in generalities here. I don't need to know anybody's life story if they're going to miss class or turn anything late. I have received student emails illustrating horrible bodily functions in graphic detail to explain why they didn't turn something in on time. I'm like… you just need to tell me you don't feel well. I don't need to know the rest of this. What about you? ﻿Z: I got a comment from a student asking about the syllabus and she's like, “You know, I don't quite understand why this and this would add up to this. Why 25 and 25 + 50 would add up to the whole course. I think you’re missing something here.” Then she backtracked. “Oh wait, that’s 100%.” ﻿And I had a student that said that his grandpa—the same grandpa—died two times in the semester. 

MEMBER SPOTLIGHTS: LAUREN & ZUZANNA

Teachers be teachin'

The Interview