You May Already Be Feeling It
Maybe you felt it when you registered for this course. Maybe it arrived when you read the syllabus and saw words like "binary," "CPU," or "fetch-decode-execute cycle." Maybe it hasn't hit yet. But sometime in the next few weeks you may sit down to work through material and have a sudden, uncomfortable thought: Everyone else probably gets this faster than I do. I'm not sure I belong here.
That feeling has a name. It's called imposter syndrome, and I want to talk about it directly before we get into any content because in twenty-plus years of teaching this course to K–12 educators, I have watched it trip up good teachers who had every reason to be here.
Here is what I've noticed, cohort after cohort: the music teacher assumes the math teachers have a built-in advantage. The elementary teacher assumes the high school teachers must find this obvious. The high school teacher watches a colleague answer a question quickly and thinks, she's so much further along than I am. Almost none of those assumptions are accurate. Almost all of them feel completely real.
What It Actually Is
Imposter syndrome does a specific, sneaky thing: you take the accurate thought "I don't know this yet" and quietly rewrite it as "I am not capable of knowing this." Those two sentences feel similar, but they mean completely different things. The first one describes where you're starting. The second one invents a ceiling that doesn't exist.
The research on this is pretty consistent: the people most likely to feel like frauds are not the ones who lack ability. They're the ones who take the work seriously enough to notice how much they don't yet know. If you're feeling it, that's actually a reasonable sign that you're paying attention.
There's also a social piece to this that I want you to know about, especially because of how your small group will work. When people feel like they're behind, they tend to hide it. They nod along. They don't ask the question. They wait until everyone else leaves to go re-read the section three times. Which means that in any group, everyone can simultaneously feel like the least prepared person in the room because they're all watching each other's performances, not each other's actual experience.
The person who seemed so confident last week? There's a good chance they went home and quietly re-read the same section you did. You'll probably never know, because they didn't say so.
Your small group can be a genuinely powerful thing, or it can quietly make imposter syndrome worse — and the difference comes down to whether anyone is willing to go first. The most helpful thing you can do is just say when you're confused. Not to make a point about being humble — just because it's true, and because the moment you say it, at least one other person in the room is going to feel relieved.
Three Things That Actually Help
It would be "easy" for me to simply tell you to just believe in yourself. But it isn't that simple. Here are three things that actually work.
1. Name it when it shows up
When you encounter something that doesn't make sense and yout feel that spike of anxiety try saying to yourself, out loud if it helps: This is hard and new. That is a valid feeling for someone learning something unfamiliar. The anxiety isn't evidence that you don't belong. It's evidence that the learning is real. Those two things get mixed up a lot, and separating them makes a difference.
2. Reconnect with why you're here
In a moment, you'll write two short reflections: one about yourself as a teacher, and one about your history with CS. Take them seriously. They are not just introductory paperwork — they're an opportunity to put into words what you value and what brought you here, before any content creates pressure. Reminding yourself of your whole identity — not just your current uncertainty — genuinely helps the material land better.
Save what you write. You may want to read it again in a few weeks — not to see how far you haven't come, but to see how far you have.
3. Say something out loud
In your small group. To me. To a colleague. Imposter syndrome loses most of its power when you name it in company. Saying "I'm finding this confusing" or "I didn't follow that" almost always gets a response of "I'm glad you said that, me too" — and that moment does more than any amount of private reassurance can.
The Thing Worth Remembering
Computer science content is genuinely unfamiliar to most people who start this course. There's no version of this where that isn't true at the beginning. There's also no version where it stays true by the end. Every cohort before yours has made that change. This one will too.
Before you continue: Watch the short video from Dr. Schafer that accompanies this reading. Then move on to the two reflections assigned. Take them seriously. They're there for a reason and they are doing more work than they look like they are.