If you were ever wondering what I was doing one random day teaching AWS re/Start on Zoom, while learners are quietly taking an assessment on networking and Amazon Web Services, the answer is, this blog post.

Last night before going to sleep, for some reason, all I could remember was the phrase “ strange bedfellows.”

Probably because I was about to lay in bed, because Barry S4E2 last night had a scene with Hank and Cristobal at Dave and Busters making some strange bedfellows, I ended up searching this term lodged in my brain somewhere deep that resurfaced.

My search brought me to No Sweat Shakespeare, some YouTube videos of people doing Shakespeare’s The Tempest Act 2 Scene 2 where the quote is featured, and other fun variations on the quote by people like Groucho Marx, Charles Dudley Warner, Nalini Singh, Helen Thomas.

I personally think it applies to my classroom. Earlier today we covered a section in the networking module of the AWS course, and while doing the lab demonstration in breakout rooms, I found myself with some strange bedfellows all learning the cloud together.

People who finished high school; new mothers; ex-veterans; even some with PhDs! All applied to Per Scholas, and ended up in my cohort, doing this AWS lab in Management Console/Console Home.

I coached them through the lab, as I have done for hundreds of people by now, and was stunned by how words written between 1610-1611, passed to me through some English class I took at some point in my 26 years, were relevant to Barry, and also my classroom.

Your Takeaways from this story: you never know who you will be “bedfellows” with (your classmates), you may not know them well or like them at first (which can change with some awkward laughs), but you can still work together to accomplish your common objectives (this AWS lab before the next scheduled class break).

It felt good to do good, and to share this story with you.

Feel free to check out other stories on this website of mine!