To teach more is to learn more

I'm sitting in a classroom at the Centre for Creative Communications, a campus of Centennial College that's just walking distance from my Riverdale home. My C108-01 students are busily (and quietly, which is a nice change) working on their final written exams.

I've been the instructor for two sections of this course this year. It's titled 'Tools and Processes for the Communicators' but it might as well be called 'Intro to Reality.' And that goes for the teacher as much as for the students.

I've taught here at the Centre before: last year, I got my feet wet as an instructor, teaching in a program called "Online Writing and Information Design." I taught one year-long core course, in which we redesigned the Riverdaleshare.com website, and a second, semester-long course in which we dealt with standards of editing and publishing for the web.

My classes had 9 people in them, ranging in age from 21 to 56. All were graduates already, and all were interested in what we were studying. Our classes were dynamic, discursive, wide-ranging, and fun. I loved it. I felt like I had found some part of my true calling. I came to class every day excited, involved, curious and happy. It was a dream come true.

One of my fellow teachers asked me at one point how I was liking it so far. I told him I thought it was great. He arched his eyebrows and in his thick Polish accent, pronounced the fateful words 'don't get spoiled!"

How prophetic he was. This year's classes are each 3 to 4 times the size of that single group I had all last year. And the students are young: mostly ranging from 17-19 years old. They're nominally students in the Creative Advertising program, but there's no way of knowing at this early stage how many of them will wind up in that field.

Most of what they need to know right now has nothing to do with advertising. They need to know how to live, how to behave, how to speak and how to write, and what to expect from the academic environment, the work world and the world at large. Most of all, they need to learn first that they need to know all of this. I sometimes get the impression that they think they know it all already... a little like me at that age. That doesn't make my job any easier.

Am I the guy to teach what amounts to a session of life lessons? I thought so at first - I've had such a wide-ranging set of experiences myself, I figured I'd be a natural. And I usually relate well to youth: I'm not polished or posh, and I speak my mind without worrying too much about formalities.

But what I've really discovered is not what I have to teach, but what I have to learn. I've had to learn how young people think, what their concerns are, what their experiences have been, and what they want. There have been a lot of suprises, and I'm still learning a lot, day by day.

This has been a tough semester for me. I'm glad of it. I hope it's been as tough for my students as it has for me. That might just mean they learned something. If they've learned as much as I have, then it's all been worthwhile.