Life as a Corkscrew Coach #3: Back on Set
From Student to Coach, is it Better Being Back in Exeter or Better Being Back on Corkscrew?
I knew I loved this program, but it took coming back to find out why. When I first landed, I thought it was all about re-discovering the creature comforts. Landing the first night, it mattered little how tired I was. I found my old haunt, pointed to a box, and out came the most delicious cider — just the same as I remember. Golden and still, the sour notes hit me like an old song. One that I hadn’t heard in years.
Even the guy behind the counter was just the way I remembered him, sporting wacky dreadlocks and a wealth of knowledge. Though if plumbing the depths and heights of the city of Exeter was my soundtrack, then my experience on Corkscrew was a full blown cinema. The ciders, the man behind the counter, the ancient walls and stunning views — all of it, I’m convinced, would’ve been nothing but prop work had it not been for the mission I was on those years ago.
Standing on the other end of the aisle, this time as a coach, I realize that my students on the Corkscrew program are also on a mission. They’re not sure what they want, and professional life to them looks like being sorted into long narrow lanes. There’s something missing and they can’t put their finger on it. The old ways don’t work and they know if they don’t do something different with their time they’ll merely repeat what’s been done before.
They want to be like their heroes and have people to look up to. Maybe even be looked up to themselves. Even though I don’t feel like that person, and at times my fellow coaches don’t either, we’re teaching them to go for it. We get to be those role models on a program that encourages you to do whatever you want as long as it’s what you’re meant to do.
It should seem strange that one would want to go to work when all around is storied castles and pastoral landscapes. That you might even enjoy being cramped into a building and getting coughed on by thirty-five students (I’m sick, now) never really occurred to me.
I’m lucky enough to watch students go from stumbling over themselves if asked a simple question to pitching a full-fledged business idea in front of an audience of critics. It’s rewarding, a hell of a feeling, and it makes cider go down better at the end of a hard fought day.
The students enter as pups and leave as wolves, hungry for the next time they can get in front of people and own their work. They ask with desperation what their grade was when the week before their heads were prone on a desk, with every other statement about how they were getting on a half-assed lie.
Corkscrew never has been about external pressure and beating people about the head with maxims, as much as educational systems would wish it to be so. Students intrinsically begin to care because they want to, something unheard of in most educational programs, and an ideal for a teacher. For my first time teaching especially, it’s like landing in a tub of butter.
Corkscrew has always been about potential, and we have a lot of that.
To be fortunate enough to go on this program, to follow your passion, to decide what your standards are and enact the plan you never knew you had all along, is to experience the many hidden compartments of your mind and use them to the fullest. Given the amount of people who never get to visit that uncharted territory in our short time on Earth, or feel the near limitless possibilities of doing work you care about, you really feel like this is life — and you wouldn’t want to miss any of it.
The sentimentality? Historic buildings? Change of scenery?
In the end they are just nice bonus.
