Why I still teach after 15 years

People tell me I earn more freelancing, that it eats time, that it no longer fits my positioning. Except teaching is not a side activity: it is the backbone of everything else.

Fifteen years of classes, ten years as a pedagogical lead. At regular intervals, someone asks me why I keep going, armed with the unbeatable day-rate argument. The answer has three parts.

The question I get asked

The objection is always the same: it eats time and pays less per hour. It is right on the accounting and wrong on the strategy. It assumes teaching takes time away from the craft, when it feeds it.

What teaching gives

• The ability to simplify. When you explain UX to a first-year student for fifteen years, you end up knowing what is genuinely fundamental and what is just jargon. That clarity shows up in every brief, every deliverable, every client exchange.
• A constantly renewed eye. Every cohort challenges what you thought settled. Tools change, habits change, questions change. A designer who does not teach ends up working in a bubble.
• Transmission as a discipline. Knowing how to do it is one thing. Knowing how to explain why you do it is another skill. That is what turns a good designer into an art director.

A designer who does not teach ends up working in a bubble. Every cohort challenges what you thought settled.

What it changes for a client

What interests a client is obviously not my life as a teacher. It is what it produces in a project.

A designer who has spent fifteen years justifying every decision to a class with no reason to take their word for it does not present the same way. They do not say it is better like this. They explain why, with arguments that hold.

My clients do not only pay for design. They pay for fifteen years of fieldwork and fifteen years of teaching, fused into every creative decision. That double reading is what makes a method transmissible rather than intuitive, and therefore reusable by the company after I leave.

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Frequently asked questions

Isn't teaching less profitable?

Per hour, yes. Strategically, no: it produces the clarity, the renewed eye and the ability to justify, which directly benefit every client project.

How does it change a deliverable?

A method you can teach is a method you can document. The client leaves with an explainable system, not intuitive choices impossible to reproduce.