The moment I look for in every leadership workshop
The most resistant person in any workshop I have ever run has never been the most junior person in the room.
It is almost always the most senior position.
This is not because senior leaders are not intelligent. But because they have spent years being the person with answers, a workshop asks them, for a few hours, to be the person with questions. This is a very different posture. For some people, it is genuinely threatening.
On the summer, finally
There is a specific moment at the end of the academic year that no amount of professional composure can fully conceal.
The last student has submitted. The final grade has been entered. The inbox, which has spent the better part of nine months in a state of low-grade emergency, goes quiet. And somewhere between closing the laptop and opening something cold, a thought arrives with the particular clarity that only exhaustion can produce.
I need to lie down for approximately three weeks. This is not a complaint. It is a medical observation.
On the year of the thesis
There is a particular kind of professional relationship that has no clear analogue elsewhere in teaching. Not quite mentor and student. Not quite collaborator. Not quite editor, though there is a lot of editing. Not quite therapist, though there are moments, usually around the sixth month, always on a deadline, where the line becomes difficult to locate. Supervising a Master's thesis is its own thing entirely. And a year of it, which is what the Digital Design MA requires, is long enough to watch someone change.
At the end of the year
There is a particular atmosphere in the room at the end of the year.
The work is finished, or as finished as it will be. The deadlines have passed. The presentations are done. The all-nighters have been survived, some more gracefully than others. What remains is something quieter. A collective exhale. And underneath it, something that is harder to name.
Students look at their work differently at the end of a year than they do at any other point.
Teaching something you are still learning
There is a version of teaching that presents itself as complete. The expert at the front of the room. The knowledge is transferred in one direction. The implicit contract: I have been here before, and I will show you the way. I have never been comfortable with that version.
First Draft, Pun Intended
I have been meaning to start this blog for approximately ten years. In that time, I have designed websites for other people, taught hundreds of students how to communicate ideas clearly and with intention, facilitated workshops specifically about the value of getting things out of your head and into the world and somehow, simultaneously, found every possible reason not to do this particular thing myself.