Last term I the great experience of co-teaching an intensive, full time course on Drupal site development at a local computer school run by the folks at northstudio.com (who also do Drupal development) in my home town of Victoria, Canada. It was a small class and a diverse one. Some of the nine students were turning to web development after other careers in law, the building trades, or alternative health. Others had personal projects that required a content management system approach. I taught one day per week. For me, the twelve weeks were a great opportunity to share some of my own insights and also to reconnect with the experience of being new to Drupal. I learned a lot from the questions and ideas that came up every day in class. As a developer I can get pretty removed from the day to day experience of new users grappling with the complexities of building out a site. There's nothing like teaching to force you turn theory into practice--and quick. And there are the inevitable moments where we come across our own shortcomings.... One week I was leading students through building out a multilingual site and got to the part when I wanted a Views filter to show outdated translations. That's a filter I wrote myself, and I must confess to a moment of quite pride as I demoed it. But, what's this? The label on that checkbox doesn't make a bit of sense. "Published"? That's not what we're filtering for here. Drat, a copy and paste error from the filter I based this new one on. Time to pause the lesson and talk about how to file issues.... In the last week of classes students turned in their course projects. Most found practical projects addressing local needs. A small community hall on one of the Gulf Islands between Vancouver and Vancouver Island will get a site where they can track hall bookings by community groups. First Nations artists will have a new place to profile their work. And the local BMX biking community will get a fresh and feature rich site to help them connect and engage, both on the track and off. The fact a small city like Victoria can feature a full time course on Drupal in itself says a lot about how far Drupal has come. And if twelve weeks seemed at first like a lot of time, at the end of the course students were suggesting the next course be a week or two longer, to fit in more time on more challenging topics like advanced Views configuration. I think I've got some fresh insight now into why those Lullabot staffers always seem so cheerful. Sharing what you know is good for the soul. So is reengaging with the energy and insights of a fresh group of users. I'll sign up again for teaching the next chance I get.