Monday Morning Journalism

This week at school there was one consistent conversation in the halls and classrooms on the 4th floor: underage drinking, facebook, and getting called out on it by a peer. Who was the “snitch” who printed out photographs from facebook and gave them to the dean? Why did they do it? What would happen? Could the school do anything? Why this week when so much was riding on the early college application process? How would parents react?
Wake up!
It was a wake up call that my journalism class reported on, working in groups on the many parts of the story, interviewing parents, students, and administrators. This was the perfect teachable moment: how do you write objectively when you are scared and angry? The school reacted wisely, the kids discovered, and we are publishing a broadside on Monday (maybe Tuesday morning) with all of their stories because, even though they asked for them, the school newspaper editors did not use the j-class stories but chose to let a senior buddy write a piece that was full of inaccuracies and connotative language.

Polls Show…

In that broadside we also get to publish the results of the pre-election poll of 75% of the upper school students, fielded by the history elective in participatory democracy and compiled by the qualitative statistics class. This will be a tough story to write quickly, but I’ve got just the students to do the job. Collaborative writing on a deadline for publication – thank heavens for Google Docs!

 

An open letter to the NCAA Clearinghouse

How dare you?

How dare you say that Journalism is not a “real” English class?  How dare you say that my curriculum is not rigorous?  What do you know about the day to day challenges of the student journalist? What do you know about how hard they work to report and write stories?  What do you know about publishing a newspaper or a magazine?

I don’t tell you how to coach, to play, or to run your organization.  I don’t even begin to imagine the complexities of your work.  How can you imagine the complexities of ours?

I’m tired today because I was up until after midnight commenting on and editing student writing.  They are writing again tonight, draft two of the same story – crafting, thinking, writing.  I guess I shouldn’t put forth so much effort or ask my students to work as hard as I do because clearly the work we do is lightweight and should be easy, right?  So how come it’s so hard to do well?

Come teach my class.  I dare you.

 

Senioritis

It’s a Friday, and I have the pleasure of teaching two of my classes of seniors: one at 8:10 in the morning,, and one at 1:00 in the afternoon. Both classes are sleepy; the ‘just rolled out of bed’ crowd and the ‘post lunch drowsies’ patrol. The morning class was my journalism class and we screened Chris Hegedus & DA Pennebaker’s The War Room. This idea came to me after the criticism that George Stephanopoulos received after the most recent ABC debate between Clinton and Obama.

I asked the class at the time of the debate if they thought that GS had a vested interest in Hillary’s campaign. Blank looks followed. I forget, because the students here posture as politically active and aware, that they were two years old when Bill Clinton was running against George HW Bush.

So we began looking at the film, and they are amazed at how James Carville works the press. We had to stop at a point where there was some question about what would happen next, and lo, and behold, they were all awake and engaged. I know that the campaign manager did not participate in this documentary and because of it we see the “spin” part of the campaign. But as student journalists, they need to think about how we are being spun. Note to self… keep it real.