Some notes on teaching
In Quebec we have a thing called an RAC, a Reconnaissance des acquis et des compétences, which is a sort of paper diploma you can get for things like graphic design that you might have learned on the job over years. These are granted by vocational schools. You demonstrate you know your trade, you might brush up your lesser skills by taking a module or two, and then you get the paper.
I thought I'd look into this, and in February I called around to ask about it. But instead, what they said to me was “Maybe you should be teaching for us.”
Graphic design business has been slow lately, so with the general principle in mind that you never say no, I said yes. I talked to several people at the school commission that runs the program, and was suddenly on the schedule to teach proofreading in lower NDG, two hours a day, as of February 17. A 60-hour module on proofreading - to a class of 23 people all relatively recently arrived from China. The commission gives you nothing but a target list of things that ought to be imparted - no books or course materials. The only advice I got from a senior person in the commission was to put my hair up.
I taught from 5 till 7 every weekday, which means I got the students at the end of their day, but was unable to do a full afternoon session in a Petite-Patrie studio where I've been working on and off for years. Luckily the studio owner was willing to be flexible - she was well aware she hasn't been giving me many paid hours lately - so some days I was bouncing out of there at 4, grabbing a metro NDG-wards, and then taking the 90 bus to the school to start teaching at 5. Since the module only lasted from mid-February till April 8, with an entire week off in the middle for spring break, I always had my eye on it not being a long-term hassle.
Fortunately for me, there's a good espresso joint at the corner by the school. I can do anything if there's espresso handy.
The program is a crash course in the technical basics of graphic design. There's no history, theory or aesthetics except for whatever the teachers add personally as they go along. It's all broken out into modules, some focusing on a specific application like Photoshop, some working on things like prepress standards. Proofreading was a tricky one, as I gathered when I met a few of my colleagues at a ped day. Making proofreading interesting for that many hours meant having a collection of exercises on hand, which I didn't have, although some of the other teachers kindly shared theirs with me, and after a point I was able to devise some myself. The module description is somewhat fusty and old-fashioned, insisting on things like reading comprehension and edging into copyediting, which in my view is another domain entirely, but I added some more modern angles like annotating PDF files and customizing spell checkers.
I was always aware of working with people for whom English is very much a second language, and in some cases a third. Several of the students had been here a little longer than the others and had already learned passable French, so I found myself occasionally explaining things in French as well. Most of the students used an online Chinese-English translator to better understand written instructions, which was fine by me. I encouraged them to use any tool that helped them do the work.
Some of the older people in this vocational system have some odd ideas, including that students ought not to have access to their phones or to the internet. My position on this is simple: these students will never have to work in the 20th century. They will always have the internet and their phones. So long as nobody focused their attention on their phone for an extended time, I was fine with it. The only things I occasionally stopped in the classroom were sleeping, eating serious food (burgers and sandwiches were out, but light snacks were OK) and blatantly working on projects for other classes, which occasionally happened. I had a spyware on the teacher mac that let me see what all of them were doing onscreen, and mostly it was fine, but I didn't watch them like hawks.
The school provides an iMac for each student, and they do all their work on it during school hours. There was no homework to plan or to correct, which was a mercy. The students all but live in the classroom, sitting at the same computer beside the same friends for the 15 months of the course. I think they must have chosen their seat assignments rather than getting them dealt randomly, because there were clearly little cliques pooled here and there - the Three Clever Lads in back, teams of young women who shared their work, a couple of male-female pairs who might have been romantic or simply friends who worked well together, a small row of unruly girls who preferred looking at shopping sites and doing stuff on their phones, and were often absent from class. There were a couple of loners, too, who were the best designers in the class, interestingly. Then there was J., who slept quite often in back, and who sometimes seemed more like a kitten than a human being.
All the students were adults, although some had more of a goof-off childish approach to life and others were clearly more serious in intent. By the end, I had a strong sense of most of their personalities, although I could not have characterized them socioeconomically or politically.
I was careful when I assigned texts to correct, to select interesting passages that didn't have political content or difficult or flowery language. One of the passages was an edited extract from Wikipedia about the history of the European settlement of Montreal. I had had them do a page layout on a city of their choice and a lot of them chose to do their hometowns - in many cases, much larger cities, or much older cities, or both, than this one. Without getting too self-deprecatory I told them how relatively recent Montreal is as a settlement - we're fussing over its 375th anniversary next year - and how even 100 years ago NDG was mostly an orchard. I don't know what they made of that.
The exercises were meant to give them a sense that consistency and regularity were part of what a proofreader looks for, beyond mere spell checking. Some of the students never really grasped the importance of this. I know from glancing at some of the locally distributed Chinese newspapers that found their way into the classroom that the graphic aesthetic is quite different - the sense of how much text you want to wedge into a space, how consistent you want to be with size and spacing and colour. Some of these papers may be sort of older-immigrant-style and not exactly the aesthetic of young people from mainland China, but I can't be sure.
By the end of the class I had pretty much run out of angles on proofreading, and spent a weekend making up the two exams. The system at the school is they'd write the exam and I'd correct it that night and give them the results the next day. If anyone failed, they have the right to request a second go, and I'd have the second exam ready to distribute if needed.
Nobody needed it. Everyone, including the sleepy guy and the goofing-off girls, passed with flying colours. The Three Clever Lads gave me a nice card and some jasmine tea as a thank-you present.
I'll be teaching proofreading again beginning at the end of May, this time in the main technical hub on Beaubien East, at night. In the meantime I'll be assessing my notes and putting my course into slightly more logical order, maybe improving the exercises.
The commission is signing students up for its vocational programs like crazy, so I have hopes this trend may continue. As I was preparing to end my module I met a young woman who'd just been drafted to teach Photoshop. “They told me Saturday I was starting to teach on Monday!” she told me in a slight panic. Nobody had shown her the classroom software either. I passed along what I'd learned - it was odd to feel like an old hand already.
I kind of miss some of my students.
Am I one of nature's teachers? Yes and no. I can consolidate my ideas and pass along knowledge and principles. But I don't get a rush from telling people what to do, and from what I've seen, some people do. They really do.
I thought I'd look into this, and in February I called around to ask about it. But instead, what they said to me was “Maybe you should be teaching for us.”
Graphic design business has been slow lately, so with the general principle in mind that you never say no, I said yes. I talked to several people at the school commission that runs the program, and was suddenly on the schedule to teach proofreading in lower NDG, two hours a day, as of February 17. A 60-hour module on proofreading - to a class of 23 people all relatively recently arrived from China. The commission gives you nothing but a target list of things that ought to be imparted - no books or course materials. The only advice I got from a senior person in the commission was to put my hair up.
I taught from 5 till 7 every weekday, which means I got the students at the end of their day, but was unable to do a full afternoon session in a Petite-Patrie studio where I've been working on and off for years. Luckily the studio owner was willing to be flexible - she was well aware she hasn't been giving me many paid hours lately - so some days I was bouncing out of there at 4, grabbing a metro NDG-wards, and then taking the 90 bus to the school to start teaching at 5. Since the module only lasted from mid-February till April 8, with an entire week off in the middle for spring break, I always had my eye on it not being a long-term hassle.
Fortunately for me, there's a good espresso joint at the corner by the school. I can do anything if there's espresso handy.
The program is a crash course in the technical basics of graphic design. There's no history, theory or aesthetics except for whatever the teachers add personally as they go along. It's all broken out into modules, some focusing on a specific application like Photoshop, some working on things like prepress standards. Proofreading was a tricky one, as I gathered when I met a few of my colleagues at a ped day. Making proofreading interesting for that many hours meant having a collection of exercises on hand, which I didn't have, although some of the other teachers kindly shared theirs with me, and after a point I was able to devise some myself. The module description is somewhat fusty and old-fashioned, insisting on things like reading comprehension and edging into copyediting, which in my view is another domain entirely, but I added some more modern angles like annotating PDF files and customizing spell checkers.
I was always aware of working with people for whom English is very much a second language, and in some cases a third. Several of the students had been here a little longer than the others and had already learned passable French, so I found myself occasionally explaining things in French as well. Most of the students used an online Chinese-English translator to better understand written instructions, which was fine by me. I encouraged them to use any tool that helped them do the work.
Some of the older people in this vocational system have some odd ideas, including that students ought not to have access to their phones or to the internet. My position on this is simple: these students will never have to work in the 20th century. They will always have the internet and their phones. So long as nobody focused their attention on their phone for an extended time, I was fine with it. The only things I occasionally stopped in the classroom were sleeping, eating serious food (burgers and sandwiches were out, but light snacks were OK) and blatantly working on projects for other classes, which occasionally happened. I had a spyware on the teacher mac that let me see what all of them were doing onscreen, and mostly it was fine, but I didn't watch them like hawks.
The school provides an iMac for each student, and they do all their work on it during school hours. There was no homework to plan or to correct, which was a mercy. The students all but live in the classroom, sitting at the same computer beside the same friends for the 15 months of the course. I think they must have chosen their seat assignments rather than getting them dealt randomly, because there were clearly little cliques pooled here and there - the Three Clever Lads in back, teams of young women who shared their work, a couple of male-female pairs who might have been romantic or simply friends who worked well together, a small row of unruly girls who preferred looking at shopping sites and doing stuff on their phones, and were often absent from class. There were a couple of loners, too, who were the best designers in the class, interestingly. Then there was J., who slept quite often in back, and who sometimes seemed more like a kitten than a human being.
All the students were adults, although some had more of a goof-off childish approach to life and others were clearly more serious in intent. By the end, I had a strong sense of most of their personalities, although I could not have characterized them socioeconomically or politically.
I was careful when I assigned texts to correct, to select interesting passages that didn't have political content or difficult or flowery language. One of the passages was an edited extract from Wikipedia about the history of the European settlement of Montreal. I had had them do a page layout on a city of their choice and a lot of them chose to do their hometowns - in many cases, much larger cities, or much older cities, or both, than this one. Without getting too self-deprecatory I told them how relatively recent Montreal is as a settlement - we're fussing over its 375th anniversary next year - and how even 100 years ago NDG was mostly an orchard. I don't know what they made of that.
The exercises were meant to give them a sense that consistency and regularity were part of what a proofreader looks for, beyond mere spell checking. Some of the students never really grasped the importance of this. I know from glancing at some of the locally distributed Chinese newspapers that found their way into the classroom that the graphic aesthetic is quite different - the sense of how much text you want to wedge into a space, how consistent you want to be with size and spacing and colour. Some of these papers may be sort of older-immigrant-style and not exactly the aesthetic of young people from mainland China, but I can't be sure.
By the end of the class I had pretty much run out of angles on proofreading, and spent a weekend making up the two exams. The system at the school is they'd write the exam and I'd correct it that night and give them the results the next day. If anyone failed, they have the right to request a second go, and I'd have the second exam ready to distribute if needed.
Nobody needed it. Everyone, including the sleepy guy and the goofing-off girls, passed with flying colours. The Three Clever Lads gave me a nice card and some jasmine tea as a thank-you present.
I'll be teaching proofreading again beginning at the end of May, this time in the main technical hub on Beaubien East, at night. In the meantime I'll be assessing my notes and putting my course into slightly more logical order, maybe improving the exercises.
The commission is signing students up for its vocational programs like crazy, so I have hopes this trend may continue. As I was preparing to end my module I met a young woman who'd just been drafted to teach Photoshop. “They told me Saturday I was starting to teach on Monday!” she told me in a slight panic. Nobody had shown her the classroom software either. I passed along what I'd learned - it was odd to feel like an old hand already.
I kind of miss some of my students.
Am I one of nature's teachers? Yes and no. I can consolidate my ideas and pass along knowledge and principles. But I don't get a rush from telling people what to do, and from what I've seen, some people do. They really do.