In December, I wrapped up my first semester as part of the Virginia Tech Cinema faculty. Hired just weeks before classes began, I struggled (as I assume most young professors do) to quickly dream up course syllabi, assignments, screening lists, and lecture notes. My goals, both for myself and my students, were ambitious. I strove to:

• challenge students to make great work without the work seeming impossible;
• to build students’ work ethic while encouraging them work ethically;
• to give them tools to develop creative habits rather than relying on strokes of brilliance (As Twyla Tharp has penned, “I’ve come to believe that being creative is as much a routine as it is the lightning bolt of inspiration.”); and
• to allow them to (safely) fail at all of the above.

As part of one of my classes, a new course I dubbed Community Outreach Through Documentary Video, for fifteen weeks my students worked alongside community organizations within the New River Valley. While the in-class focus was on documentary as an art and a form of activism, out-of-class work was service-learning oriented. Students logged an average of 70 hours each making short videos to help their community partners–which included regional beekeepers’ associations, a student-run art gallery, and a local farmers’ market–to better achieve their missions. As a culmination of the course, we worked together to organize a public screening of their work at the Lyric Theatre, our community’s historic, independent movie theater. After some discussion and debate, we decided to call the event Frames Per Second, a name we hoped would simultaneously allude to the medium itself as well as the way their videos ‘framed’ aspects of the community we live in.

The videos my students produced weren’t perfect, and I’m sure my teaching wasn’t either. But that afternoon in the Lyric, as I sat in the dark with over 75 strangers watching the semester’s labor on the big screen, I was reminded why I teach. When the lights came up and the applause began, I felt pride in what I was doing and, more importantly, in what these students were giving back to their community.

As a filmmaker myself, I have often been frustrated when identified as ‘just’ a teacher, rather than an artist in my own right or someone who also makes. What I felt in that moment at the Lyric, though, was not unlike the sensation I get when screening my own work before an audience. In that moment, I was reminded of the simple truth: because I teach, they can make. And in that moment, being ‘just’ a teacher was enough.