A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about our school yearbook, which is on life support. And in that blog, I admitted defeat. More honesty...more defeat...our school newspaper, The Rocketeer, is in even worse shape.
When I took the job at Rockridge and become the school newspaper adviser (along with the yearbook adviser), I didn't know how bad things had gotten. The journalism class was a shell of it's former self back in the mid-80's when I was young strapping and aspiring journalist. I was informed by our administration, in fact, that the journalism course was going to be removed from the course schedule. The solution at that time was to try to keep the newspaper alive somehow as an extra-curricular activity. The plan was to meet at least once during activity period (an extra period built into the schedule once a week for groups to meet), and I was pumped the first meeting when over twenty students showed up.
Here's the deal...in order to have a school newspaper, the paper needs students who want to make contributions. And I was just a simple naive adult. The students were mostly interested in just getting out of their 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th period class. We didn't have enough money to actually have a newspaper printed, so I worked hard to learn about Google Sites and crafted a basic website to start an online newspaper publication. And my naive weakness struck again...students now-a-days aren't as excited about ONLINE stuff - they see and use it every day.
While admittedly naive, my persistence was strong, so I basically forced the yearbook class to make contributions to the online newspaper. My logic was solid...while staffers were covering their beats for their yearbook spreads, they could make a 200-word contribution on the newspaper site. In fact the newspaper site could be like a file cabinet of information to eventually utilize while writing the copy for yearbook spreads.
Little did I know since my 1984 graduation year was that writing a contribution about anything, was similar to asking students to run a 10K. I faced it then, and I must admit that I'm still constantly shocked at how students view writing as such a labor intensive task. Needless to say the addition of the Rocketeer contributions by the yearbook staff wasn't met with much love.
In year two, I proposed to change the name and structure of yearbook class to Publications - tah dah! We would continue both publications, and students would surely understand my creative ideas of the connection of the two publications together and be equally excited....ya, not really. Time and time again, keeping The Rocketeer was a battle. According to the students, it was just too much work.
In year three, another big change. A bigger staff would surely do the trick. I would convince the administration to allow seniors to take the course for an English credit. Sure, there would be some additional units needed to include some literature analysis, but this idea DEFINITELY would propel both publications to launch themselves into a really cool thing - students would want to join Publications instead of the state recognized music department or popular FFA or perhaps even more than sports!
NOPE, NADA, NEGATIVE, NO WAY....the students basically hate the class...hate me...often times grumble at each other. Writing an interesting and captivating 200-word story in journalistic style is just too hard. (Insert deflated heavy, heavy sigh.)
WHERE DID I GO WRONG? How and when and why did school journalism become so uncool, when it could be so cool?
I've raised the white flag it despicable surrender; I've resigned. My hope is that sometime, somewhere, somehow, someone will have a different approach and be able to show students the fun in journalism. And when that happens, I hope I somehow can be a contributing part.
If you have ideas...please share them. I'd enjoy hearing from you.
JBiz
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