I kind of fell into the whole teaching thing. It was never my plan to be a teacher. I had no desire to attend teacher’s college. In fact, when I was growing up, I was never really even that fond of school. I liked to learn, but was more self-guided. I didn’t enjoy the structure of school; my attention span was far too short for long, boring lectures and 2 hour exams.

But, 20 years on in my career, here I am. A teacher.

Math sucks. Mr. Hanley was my Math teacher in Grade 11. I despised Math. I was lousy at it, it ruined my A average, and it was all I could do to muster up the energy to go to class. I’ll never forget my first day of Grade 11. I was in a brand new school, thousands of kilometres away from where I’d spent most of my childhood, and I was miserable. I walked into Mr. Hanley’s math class with a sense of dread. I didn’t know anyone, and I was convinced that I was going to flunk.

I was sombrely sitting at my desk, hatching my plan to escape out the window when suddenly, the door of the classroom opened and Mr. Hanley walked in, with a very serious look on his face. He resembled a younger, more conservatively dressed version of Dr. Johnny Fever from the 70s TV show, WKRP in Cincinnati. He shot a death dart glance around the room and the class went silent. I wondered which of the windows I should make a break for. Mr. Hanley quietly sat down at his desk. He sorted papers and shuffled paper clips for what seemed an eternity. Then, ever so slowly, he reached for his desk drawer. You could hear a pin drop. He carefully pulled out a baseball hat, and put it on. I quickly realized that this was no ordinary baseball hat. It had a brim about a foot long. On the front of the hat were two giant, Disney-esque cartoon eyes. Stuck to the brim were two large, white felt teeth. On the sides of the hat were pasted two long, floppy ears. It was Goofy.

Then, with a completely straight face, Mr. Hanley said, “So, are we ready to do some Math?”

I think we all have a teacher in our past that made an impact on us. Mr. Hanley was that teacher for me. Not only was he a laid back guy, but he treated each one of his students like a real person. We weren’t “dumb kids” in his eyes. He knew we all had infinite potential. Each day he showed up to class, Mr. Hanley had a smile on his face, and a sparkle in his eye. You could tell he just loved to teach. And even though I still hated Math, I didn’t mind going to his class, because he was simply a joy to be around. He not only helped me to “get” fractions, he helped me to understand that it was okay to be an awkward teenager. That even though I might struggle with stuff, that I was fine just the way I was. He helped me realize that challenges are part of life, and if I just try, I could make it. I got a B in his class, and I know that it wasn’t because I was any good at Math. It’s because Mr. Hanley’s passion made me want to succeed, so I tried harder.

Let’s not forget why we’re here. Another school year has started. If you’re a post-secondary teacher like me, you’re swamped. You’ve got dozens of new students, and not a whole lot of time to learn their names, let alone what makes each one tick. It’s easy to get caught up in the stress of class prep, marking and administration. It can feel like you’re on autopilot, just trying to make it through another class.

Stop.

Step back for a minute. Forget the prep and the admin for a minute. Like Seth says, don’t rehearse so much. Take a deep breath. Your students are not looking for someone who will just recite facts at the front of the class and slap marks on the top of their pages. They are looking to you to give them an experience that will help them to expand. They are looking to you to share what you know. And that doesn’t come from a PowerPoint slide. It comes from YOU.

The true love of teaching for me, is not in standing at the front of my class spewing information. It’s in sitting down beside someone and letting them show me what they’ve achieved. It’s in the conversations that happen before, and after, and during class. It’s in the Skype conversation I had with one of my students at 11pm last night, because he was excited to talk about a video he came across. And mostly, it’s in knowing that, in my own small way, I’ve been able to help some people realize their potential, like Mr. Hanley did for me.

That’s what gets me up in the morning. That’s what makes me show up to class even after I’ve already worked a 10 hour day.

Thanks, Mr. Hanley, wherever you are. You taught me what it means to be a good teacher. And I aspire to be like you every time I walk into a classroom.

Now, where did I put my Goofy hat?

[image credit: Patrick Haney on Flickr]

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Breaking with my DNA to bring you the first in a series of 1 video book reviews by yours truly. You saw it here first, folks! Oh, and then go buy the book. Seriously.

(Facebook readers, here’s the original YouTube link: http://tinyurl.com/qh6pfu)

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I read two really great blog posts this morning. One was from a person I’ve followed for some time, Kat French. The other was from someone I just met today, Wayne Kelly. The posts at first seem quite different. Kat is talking about 5 social media topics she could do without. Wayne is talking about how working hard and following your dreams is the secret to a happy life. I encourage you to go read them both.

What I found interesting is that even though both posts are about different topics, they are two sides of the same coin.

Kat points out an issue that she has (and many of us have) with what I like to call the social media bubble – a bunch of yim yams sitting around talking about the social media mumbo jumbo, posing at conferences, and complaining incessantly about inane topics like missing tweets or Facebook interface changes.

Wayne on the other hand, writes an insightful and autobiographical post about how he went from being on a career path that wasn’t right for him to being successful and happy after discovering his passion and seizing it.

Let’s explore what these posts have in common.

Every day, I find myself becoming more and more frustrated with this whole social media thing – to the point where I’m ruthlessly unfollowing and unsubscribing to people who don’t provide me value anymore. Spend all your time on Twitter talking about Twitter? Unfollow. Waste a blog post talking about all the social media “faux-lebrities” you got to drink beer with at SXSW? Unsubscribe. I’m not buying it, people. We’ve all had plenty of time to sit around with our eyeballs on our bellybuttons. Mark my words, if you are still doing it, you’re going to get left in the dust. Things are moving far too fast for you to still be circling your wagons around the possibility that someone’s going to find a viable business model in social media.

So what’s the solution? Well, for starters, how about trying to do some real work? Let’s explore what that means for a minute.

How To Know When Real Work is Getting Done

1. People who go to conferences just to hang out with rock stars are not doing real work. People who go to conferences because they are speaking at them, representing a client, or ACTUALLY trying to drum up new business contacts are doing real work.
2. People who talk about Twitter on Twitter all day long are not doing real work. People who use Twitter to connect, communicate, collaborate, and even socialize are doing real work.
3. People who sit around and talk all day about how busy they are are not doing real work. They are being busy. The people who are actually making things happen are doing real work.
4. The size of your bank account does not determine how hard you work. There are lots of lazy rich people. However, the amount of passion and drive and conviction you have can SIGNIFICANTLY affect the size of your bank account. And that, takes, you guessed it – real work.

Now, let’s take a look at Wayne’s post. Point number one that he makes is the title itself. “Stop Moaning and Make it Happen”. In other words, stop sitting around all day complaining about crap and actually go out and start doing some real work.

Wayne goes on to describe the long journey he had to take to wind up where he is now – as a video producer/editor/sound guy. He had to do crappy jobs, flunk out of school, and “in the meantime” jobs. All the while, though, he was doing one thing. Real work. Yup – even though he hated it at times. He still did real work. And while he did that real work, he thought about what he really wanted to do. While he still had that paycheck coming in, he learned to edit, and produce. Fate interjected and allowed him an opportunity to learn from a pro. Note how he seized that opportunity. He now was doing even MORE real work.

Wayne says something in his piece that is so true and is the entire point of this post.

“Work hard – but on the right things.”

That’s real work, people. Does it relate to passion? Of course. Does it mean sometimes it’s a means to an end? Absolutely – but that’s an important part of the process.

The real secret to success is not to walk around acting like you are a success. You WILL be found out eventually. The secret is to shut up. Sit down. And figure out what real, actual work you need to do to make stuff happen in your life. If your job is boring (or your don’t have one), then sitting around on Twitter all day is not going to help you. Sure, it might give you some connections. But it’s not going to change your situation for you.

You are the only one who can do that. Kat points it out. Wayne proves it.

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My good friend FenderGurl and I went to dinner last night. I love having dinner with her because we always talk about the most interesting things. Sure, we talk about work, kids, relationships, usual girl stuff, but we also go pretty deep sometimes. I rarely come away from a conversation with her without having some sort of new insight.

Last night we got talking about our passions. We were exploring what it is that makes us passionate about something, and the question arose “How do I know when I’ve found my true passion?”.

Over the past several years, as I’ve moved out of the corporate rat race and into my own thing, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring what it means to be passionate about something and how you really know when you’ve found it. It’s not as hard as you might think. But the signs that it’s actually your true passion might surprise you.

10 Signs That You May Have Found Your True Passion

1. It brings you unbelievable amounts of joy for no apparent reason.
2. It brings you unbelievable amounts of heartache for no apparent reason.
3. It makes you giddy with excitement.
4. It makes you sick to your stomach.
5. You wake up in the morning and bound out of bed because you can’t wait to get to it.
6. You absolutely dread taking the next step towards it because you are too afraid.
7. You sleep like a baby knowing that you are fully living it.
8. You lay wide awake all night worrying about it.
9. People admire you greatly because you are so passionate.
10. People criticize you often because you are so passionate.

There’s a common misconception that once you’ve found that thing you are most passionate about, that it’s all going to be sunshine and roses, that life will be perfect in every way, that your problems will just float away on a cloud. Well the thing about finding your passion is, once you’ve found it, it’s actually a lot of hard work. Why? Because your passion is that thing that gets into the core of your being. It becomes everything to you. You can’t exist without it.

Some would use the terms “obsessed” or “addicted”, when talking about passion, but I would argue that those terms imply an unhealthy relationship with something. Passion, on the other hand, is fundamentally healthy. Why? Because without your passion, your life would be less full and satisfying. With your passion, you are more whole as a person. Addictions make you weaker. Passions make you stronger.

It’s the whole downside of passion that makes it more difficult to find your passion. It’s going to make me feel sick? Lose sleep? Be criticized? Yup. Without a doubt. But that’s okay – it’s how passion works. It brings you the highest high and the lowest low, all at the same time. It makes you struggle and fight for it, and rejoice and celebrate it.

Once you find your true passion, you’ll know it. You’ll know it because you feel at once so completely ecstatic and so unbelievably afraid. And you wouldn’t have it any other way.

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I’m very excited about a new opportunity I’ll be embarking on this Fall. I am going back to teaching part time at our local community college. I taught web design at the same college about 9 years ago, for the Continuing Education and Corporate Training programs, so some of this will be very familiar to me.

The major difference this time is I’m teaching for a diploma program. In fact, it’s the latest evolution of the same diploma program I graduated from in 1998 – Interactive Multimedia Developer. It was a 7 month program when I took it, now it’s 2 years. The fact that it’s a full time diploma program means that my audience is going to be fresh-out-of-highschool NetGenners. This is quite a dramatic change from the semi-computer literate adults I’m used to teaching. The young people that are going to be in my classes have been using computers since they were old enough to talk. It’s been embedded in their culture for their entire lives.

This has me thinking about how the Net Generation is going to fare once they are out in the real world. After all, college is not just about learning some new skills, it’s about figuring out how to apply those skills in a way that will enable your success once you are out in the workforce.

I’m teaching Video and Audio production (as it relates to New Media). I’m going to teach them how to operate a camera, set up 3-point lighting, do a paper edit, edit their stuff in Premiere, and export to various media. Given that most of the students will have plenty of computer and technology experience, I don’t forsee the vast majority of them having too much trouble catching on. But in order for them to be truly successful, there’s got to be more than just “push this button to make this happen”.

The real world is not just about knowing what buttons to push. The real world is hard. College is supposed to prepare you, as much as possible, for the real world. So, in addition to the button pushing, I think these are some things that should also be taught in college:

Communication
I’m not talking about IM, Facebook or SMS texting. I’m talking about how to write a business email or a resume that gets noticed. How to pitch someone on an idea. How to cold call. How to conduct yourself on the telephone. In the real world, these kinds of communications are a daily occurrence. You’ve got to get it right from the outset, because as the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression.

Networking
Whether you’re a CEO or an entry-level cubicle dweller, being comfortable with networking is a critical real-world skill. Whether you’re the new junior in the company or just want to meet and socialize with like-minded people, knowing how to introduce yourself, strike up conversations and even interact through social networks will have a tremendous positive impact on your personal growth and ability to learn. It will also open up a whole lot more opportunities.

Continuous Learning
Hands up. How many of you graduated from university or college and thought “Now I know everything! Are you ready for me, world?” How shocking it was to realize that after all that hard work and money spent, you really didn’t know much at all. The real learning begins the moment you walk out of the school corridors and into the working world. And it never stops. Students need to learn how to LEARN. After being spoon-fed knowledge throughout their high school careers, college needs to teach them how to think for themselves – to discover, explore and be curious all the time. They need to know that graduation is the START of learning, not the end.

Be Passionate
I’ve talked about passion before. It is perhaps the most important thing that we need to be teaching our young people. I’m crazy passionate about video. I’m crazy passionate about the Internet and new media. I’m extremely enthusiastic when I talk about both. And I want my students to share my enthusiasm and passion. If they go through this course with me and don’t feel as strongly passionate about these things as I do by the end of the semester, then they will need to seriously consider if this is the right path for them. They need to be excited and amazed every day by this stuff. Developing that passion will be a cornerstone to their future success.

Now it’s your turn. Do you think students are getting enough of this kind of preparation in college? Do you think it’s necessary? Or not? I would love to hear what you think.

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