Solving a problem
Venkat Subramaniam: I solved it by detaching from the problem. As soon as I finished my class, I ran over to the phone, called my supervisor, and said, "I figured this out while teaching. Here's the reason why it's failing." He looked at the code and he agreed with me. The next thing was to call the developers. We had literally thousands of classes in our system. An immediate call went to all the developers to take 100 classes each. We plowed through the night fixing it.
That experience made me realize that this works so much in tandem: I do pair programming with my colleagues in the industry continuously, at every opportunity I get, because the only way I can be effective in teaching is by learning from the industry. I continue to teach because the only way to be really effective in my work is to take the time to continuously learn.
What's the point in learning something if you can't apply it? Much of the time, in a work environment...