If it’s true that having children brings us into closer touch with the child in ourselves (not being a parent myself, I have to take that on faith), then it’s probably equally true that the best way to get back into touch with our adolescent selves is to go into a high school classroom. When, through the Quebec Writers’ Federation Writers In the Community program, I signed on to teach eight Creative Writing sessions at Vanguard Intercultural School in Westmount, such self-revelation was the furthest thing from my mind. But it came, and I’m glad it did, because it pulled me through. At the most frustrating moments, the times when the goal of the sessions—getting fifteen teenagers to buy into the idea that self-expression through the written word is a valuable thing—felt like an exercise in delusional futility, what helped us turn the corner together was a simple realization on my part: at their age, I was just like them.

When you’ve got one fifty-minute session per week in which to try to get fifteen- and sixteen-year olds to do something they may feel no inclination to do, it’s important to acknowledge some limits. One is that they’re not going to get right down to it—you’re going to need some start-up time. (And some winding-down time.) Another is that they’re unlikely to respond unless they can sense some common ground with you, and here, I learned, anything at all is better than nothing. I would have though that Sylvester Stallone was hopelessly passé, superseded by Vin Diesel or The Rock or whoever the current human action figure might be, but he turned out to be the ultimate hero of Mark (his name, as have the others’, has been changed for this piece), to whom I was able to recommend Stallone’s early trade union epic, F.I.S.T. A bond thus established, Mark was onside for the rest of the term. In the course of a bit of music talk I mentioned that I had once seen U2 in a room the size of our classroom; that got Kirsty, previously a full-time daydreamer, to write about a Bell Centre U2 concert she was set to attend with her father. One session happened to fall on the 30th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon; I was by no means sure they’d know who Lennon was, but they did, and the manner of his death led to a productive discussion on celebrity. When I ventured the opinion that downloading—what I called, a bit pompously, the Culture of Free—precludes anyone ever again attaining the kind of unifying pop culture status The Beatles did, two of the quietest kids in the class took strong exception and launched into passionate screeds on the absurdity of putting a price on music. They didn’t convince me, but boy, were they engaged.

Sports, too, was a friend in times of need, though not always in ways I would have predicted. I learned, for example, that hockey isn’t what it once was as a national common denominator. In a roomful of Montreal teens, only two professed to be big Montreal Canadiens fans. One of those, Tony, a pint-sized aspiring NHLer, worshipped at the altar of the Habs’ Mike Cammalleri; in a game the night before one of our sessions, the diminutive winger had been in his first-ever NHL fight, and our day-after blow-by-blow analysis brought us together in ways that perhaps nothing else could have. Most of the rest, if they cared about sports at all, were more interested in soccer, with the major exception of Michael, a Shaquille O’Neal fan who, encouraged to write about why the huge basketballer meant so much to him, eventually came up with a highly original comic-ironic essay on Shaq’s status as his secret friend.

For my own part, all these cases brought back, with Proustian clarity, the moment in Grade Eight when I—until that day a doubtlessly insufferable back-row pouter and clock-watcher—learned (via being caught with a copy of Rolling Stone secreted in my Math duo-tang) that my teacher was a big Who fan. It’s no exaggeration to say that, from that day forward, school was never the same for me again. (Oh, there were setbacks, but let’s not go into those.) I’d made a connection, and having done so, could see a way forward.

Maybe it’s my memory playing tricks on me, or maybe it’s an indication that the world and young peoples’ expectations of it have changed, but it seemed to me that these kids were far more pragmatic about the reality of the working life awaiting them post-school than me and my contemporaries were at their age. They were often at their most receptive and involved when I talked about the nuts and bolts of what I do for a living. How do books get written? How much time per day do I spend writing and rewriting? These were questions they were able to apply to themselves in some way, or at least project themselves into. Advances, royalties, film rights—here was a language they seemed to speak well, certainly far better than such nebulous concepts as “creativity.” Newspapers, even though few if any people under 20 actually read them anymore, still carry some residual prestige, so my work for the Gazette fascinated them. Here, too, I was able to impart the clearest and most easily applicable of my practical lessons: respect at all times the sanctity of The Deadline. If somebody told me that when I was their age, I wasn’t listening; hopefully these kids were, and will be spared the trial-and-error odyssey that a simple observance of that dazzlingly simple rule could have spared me.

One final lesson was learned, too, by teacher as much as by students. You can talk all you want about blogging and tweeting and Facebooking, but even to the children of the Internet age there’s something deathless and ineffably appealing about the tangible reality of a book. When our group produced one—an anthology called, in Lennon-saluting tribute, In Our Own Write—the look on their faces when they saw it, and the pride with which they read their work to each other during a mini-launch on the last day of our term, erased any trace of doubt that our workshops had been worthwhile. Remember that, please, the next time some bean-counting politician tries to claim that it’s a good idea to close down your neighborhood library.