Teaching an exam changed how I read a code
Explaining something badly a few times teaches you where you did not understand it.
I have taught Lok Sewa and NEC licence preparation since early 2024. The surprise was not that teaching helped my students. It was how much it exposed in my own understanding.
When you sit an examination, you need to produce the right answer. When you teach one, you need to survive the question “but why is it that value?”, and there is no way to bluff it in front of forty people who will ask again next week.
The clearest example was the seismic code. I could apply NBC 105 correctly long before I could explain why a particular coefficient takes the value it does, what assumption it encodes, and what happens to a building when that assumption does not hold. Being forced to explain it repeatedly is what eventually made me understand that a code is a compressed argument. Every clause is a conclusion whose reasoning has been deliberately removed so that ordinary practice does not have to reconstruct it.
Once you see a code that way, you read it differently. You start asking what got compressed, and whether the assumption behind a clause holds in the case in front of you. That question has been more useful in my ministry work than any single piece of technical knowledge.
Related: this is also why I think the free material matters. Someone who cannot pay for classes should still get the compressed argument unpacked.