It's been said that everything has a lesson, if you're open to it.
Ok, maybe that was the first time anyone actually said. But I really like the sentiment.
I've been a sessional teacher at Humber College (sorry, the Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning) for about the last five years. In that time, I've come to an important conclusion.
The experience is as much about what I learn from my students as about what I hope they learn from me.
Here are some of the important lessons I've learned:
- Always explain your assumptions.
The course that I teach is communications in public administration. The skills I'm teaching form the basis of the work I've been doing professionally for a very long time. Much of the time, I confess, I do my day job by rote - that is, without really thinking about how or why. What teaching has forced me to do is to stop, evaluate my practices and approaches and think through how to explain them to someone who's never done the job. Whenever I'm telling someone what I like most about teaching, it always comes down to this: my students want to know why things are done in a certain way, not just the mechanics of the thing. It's a perfectly fair expectation for them to have. Just because you know it, that doesn't mean others automatically should - at least, not until after you're done teaching them. After all, isn't that the whole point?
- Never dismiss something just because you haven't heard of it.
As an avid music fan, I'd found myself relying increasingly on the handy service provided by metacritic.com, which helpfully aggregates and scores music reviews from all over the Internet - and beyond. However, as a borderline old fart, I was really only paying attention to reviews from publications I knew - Rolling Stone, Billboard and the like. Then, one of my students told me he liked Pitchfork. So I checked it out, and lo and behold, it also had useful, practical information. And based on its recommendation - and my student's - I took Clap Your Hands Say Yeah for a test drive. Worth a second spin, for sure. Ditto - perhaps even more so - for Rubber Factory by the Black Keys. Without their valuable insights, I might forever have remained unaware of this music, which would have been a real shame - not to mention a missed learning opportunity.
- Be clear in your expectations.
This one should have been a no-brainer. But it wasn't, at least for me. In fact, though it's fairly closely tied to point #1, it is, in fact the flipside of the same point. The students in my classroom over the years have not hesitated to question me on a point of fact, or process, or content when they they thought it appropriate to do so. Sometimes it turns out they're right. Sometimes it turns out they're not. But either way, they have the right to seek clarification. Whether I'm giving them an assignment, imparting information or providing the structure of a lesson, they also have the right to know (a) why I am doing so, and (b) what it is that I expect them to get out of the conversation. I have also been helped immeasurably in this regard - evaluating my own expectations - by the brilliant academics who run the program in which I teach. Proving? That I will never, ever be in the same league that they are.
Undoubtedly, there are other lessons. Perhaps as the subject of another post.
In fact, this post could just as easily have been called "First principles." In many ways, what I learn in the classroom reminds me of my first experience, as a reporter at the Huron Expositor in beautiful, cosmopolitan Seaforth, Ont. (pop. 2,300) in the summer of 1985. I had never lived in a community smaller than Toronto before that, and was shocked - shocked! - to discover that everyone in the town knew who I was.
But more important, during that summer, I learned a lesson that has stuck with me ever since - the importance of taking responsibility for my work. Because - wherever I went that summer - someone would say, "You're the new reporter, right? Well, I read what you wrote and..."
Sometimes we forget that we don't exist in a vacuum. Experiences like these serve to help keep us grounded.
