It's a funny thing, looking at another direction that may have been interesting to take in life.
I've been doing what I do for a long time, but even I sometimes forget that I didn't intend to become a news journalist when I was growing up.
What I wanted to do was make movies.
I guess it started when I was 13 years old and when my buddies and I would routinely make videos for my high school English class. Ms. Tam was great about "letting our artistic rivers flow" and gave us carte blanche to create, shoot, edit and present our cinematic masterpieces; of course, as long as it stayed within the intended subject matter.
It was a blast, and it was something that stayed with me throughout the rest of my days at Outlook High School. (go Blues)
That was really one of the greatest things about high school for me; our teachers gave us our guidelines, sure, but as far as HOW we were delivering our work, that was left up to us. My buddies and I made movie after movie, entertaining our classmates and conjuring up a bit of a "fanbase" who wondered 'what those guys will come up with next'.
When high school was over, my focus became film school and I wound up moving to Canada's West Coast to attend the Victoria Motion Picture School on Vancouver Island. Those eight months were life-changing, perspective-gaining, and soul-enriching. I loved it. It was something that I felt was desperately needed in my life at the time; a drastic change of scenery, a different flow, a look into how another side of humanity operated.
But as we all know, making movies isn't the career I ended up with in the end.
Coming back home, I quickly found that my options were limited in Saskatchewan as far as getting "in the biz" unless I wanted to go fetch coffee for newscasters on CTV or CBC, or go pull cables around on the set of Corner Gas, and that wasn't for me. I wasn't a fetcher or an errand boy, I was a writer. I wanted to tell stories, and I wanted to captivate people.
One left turn and a twist or two later, I wound up with the career that I maintain today.
Am I capitivating people entering a movie theater? No, but I like to think I'm still entertaining them with the news stories that I write.
But I'd be lying if I said I didn't think about how different my life would be if I chose another career.
I got to thinking about this after my visit down to Dinsmore on Thursday, just before the Good Friday/Easter weekend kicked in.
I was invited to participate in Dinsmore Composite School's Kids Convention, which offered students the chance to learn about a wide variety of over two dozen different activities, skills and career paths such as cattle ranching, glass blowing, taekwondo, construction, and of course, journalism with yours truly.
I had a blast talking to kids about what I do for a living, and the questions I was asked told me that more than a few of them were interested in possibly pursuing this as a job option one day. I also tasked them with writing their own stories, and I was left pretty impressed with what I heard.
This wasn't my first time doing something like this, as I was asked to come talk to students for a pair of similar events that were held at the school in Lucky Lake a few years back.
One thing that stuck with me as I was leaving the Dinsmore school the other day was how I might have fared as a teacher if this whole journalism thing didn't work out. Could I have been a decent educator of young minds? Would I be a hard-ass or a softie? Would my students go on to earn immaculate degrees or be those kids who just manage to skate by out of high school and throw themselves into the nearest job field available?
Questions, questions.
Sometimes, you don't really know how good you are at something or how naturally something comes to you until you're simply thrown into the field. Talking to kids, teaching them a thing or two, conversing back and forth; I find that it comes easy to me, regardless of the age.
And here's the thing about kids: they're criminally under-appreciated.
Kids today have to live in a world where social media is bombarding them with 97 different viewpoints at once, tech giants are telling them they have to buy this, this and that in order for their daily lives to function properly, and the job options and markets are forever changing seemingly on a daily basis. You couldn't pay me to be a kid today! The pressures they're under are intense, but luckily, they're resilient.
I was thinking about this on the drive after leaving Dinsmore. My job as a journalist and that of a teacher are similar, when I think about it. Often, I'll write a story on something that students did in class or highlight the efforts of one student in particular, and then I'll be blown away as time shoots by on the calendar and suddenly, that 17-year old kid that I interviewed is now a 27-year old and married with kids. As a teacher, that 5-year old just starting Kindergarten will blossom over the next dozen years into a student that is on the brink of graduating high school.
Time flies.
Teachers have my utmost respect, and students have my admiration.
Thanks for having me, Dinsmore. I'd do it again in a heartbeat!
For this week, that's been the Ruttle Report.
