I was raised in a small town called Alavus in western Finland, a place with nearly as many cows as people. Most of my memories of school are less than ideal.
The teachers at my junior high school were hard-line authority figures. You were afraid to even look at them the wrong way, let alone engage with them or challenge their views.
I was the shortest student in my class—a tiny, skinny kid who was constantly bullied. Unsurprisingly, I did not do particularly well in school.
We are not climbing a mountain. We are walking across a flat plane.
Everything changed when I entered high school and met a teacher of psychology and theology whose classes I genuinely enjoyed. She approached teaching differently. She was open to suggestions, questions, and new ideas. She had a calm, easygoing demeanor and a sense of humor that I still remember decades later. After her classes, I would often leave with a strange feeling, as if I had briefly visited another country. I felt my heart glow.
Her husband taught English and Swedish, and I enjoyed his classes just as much. Over time, I became friends with their family, and I have remained in touch with them to this day.
It is difficult to overstate the impact these people had on my life. They opened doors and windows in my mind that I did not even know existed.
From the beginning, these were true horizontal relationships. I immediately recognized that they knew far more than I did, but there was never any need to enforce that fact through authority. The mind is a curious thing. It opens on its own when it wants to, but the hinges tend to seize when pressure is applied.
For the past few years, I have been working as an associate professor at Digital Hollywood University in Tokyo, teaching seminars and classes focused on real-time content creation.
Lately, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about what I can actually offer the young students who have enrolled in CG studies during this strange era of AI-generated content.
Rather than presenting ideal solutions in an authoritative form—”this is correct, and this is wrong”—I have found that students respond much more strongly when the relationship remains horizontal.
I am simply another person trying to get better at Unreal Engine. We are not climbing a mountain. We are walking across a flat plane. Some have walked farther than others, and some have only just begun, but we are all moving through the same landscape together.
I would like to be a fellow traveler on that journey.
But most of all, I would like to listen to what my students have to say, because I think there are not nearly enough people doing that.