Melissa Wantz: Notes from West Egg

As of tomorrow, I am a journalism adviser. Officially. Not in my dreams. Not in my plans. Not just on paper. Not ideally. But really, practically, wonderfully. School starts tomorrow. Journalism 2.0 meets for the first time. As a former journalist, there is a part of me that can’t believe how excited I am about this opportunity to launch a brand new class, program and organization at my high school. It’s small stuff, after all, compared to the rigors and prestige of working for my county’s largest newspaper back in my 20s and 30s, compared to writing a column (back before there were blogs). I used to think teaching journalism would be, well, kind of boring. A step down the ladder. A move in the wrong direction. A bore.

But that was also back when journalism was a one-way street and limited to the printed page. Back when “news” didn’t make a high school paper because every issue was at least a week old when it landed from the printer. Being a high school journalism teacher in the 2.0 world is quite a bit different than hoping 500 or so fragile tabloid copies get into the right hands, and I have had a lot of fun this summer developing from scratch an online news site that has the potential — if not the practicality — to reach around the globe.

I’m wondering if it’s possible to accurately convey to the 30 students who show up in Period 5 tomorrow just what power I’m turning over to them. The power of this broad, instant reach. The power to make their voices heard like those darn persistent Whos in “Horton Hears a Who.” We are here, we are here, we are here! Do they realize, really realize, what the protection of the First Amendment and state and federal law confers on them? That their online news site cannot be shut down, taken away, denied? That their public forum cannot be excised from the course schedule by a hostile party, unlike “Publick Occurrences,” the first American paper, which was forbidden, burned and its publisher jailed back in 1690? That their adviser cannot be fired or forced out of her position (not in California anyway).

Is it possible to really communicate the difference that exists from just 10 years ago for ordinary people to be heard? My students were born in 1992-94. They’ve never really known a world without email and Google and PayPal. They don’t remember a time without FaceBook or MySpace or YouTube. It’s so easy to communicate now. Instantly. At no cost. With friends, with enemies, with strangers. The gatekeepers are dead, dying or irrelevant. Mostly anyways. The kids have no idea.

I will start class tomorrow with a welcome and an attempt to give them perspective. The first newspaper, handwritten and hung on street corners, was decreed by Julius Caesar in 59 BC and titled “Acta Diurna.”  The last news organization was born one second ago. And one second from now. There will be no end to them, and that is enough to make any journalist’s heart beat faster. I would not trade living in this era in this place for any other time in history.

And to The Foothill Dragon Press: welcome to a great big exciting fast connected world–it’s a nice time to be born.

(Photo Credit: “Yesterday News,” Creative Commons Licensed by Zarko Drincic on Flickr.com)

There is something special about the day before school starts. It’s in the air, a sense of expectation, of hope. A tinge of uncertainty and novelty and wondering. The feeling of possibility and desire. It’s hard to put summer away, to get to bed early, to sleep soundly on the day before school starts. It’s hard to pick up the routine and be on time and be ready so early. But there is a buzz around town and a readiness to dig back into social networks and difficult tasks, challenges and heavy loads. There is a willingness to put shoulder to an unmovable object and try to give it a budge. We are rested, the teachers and students, and we are eager to begin again. The new is calling.

Last summer a book that inspired me to take more chances in my teaching was Dan Pink’s  “A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the World.” Great book about the current transition in American society from an information age to a conceptional age, from left- to right-brain thinking.

This summer I read “Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity” by Hugh MacLeod. MacLeod is a cartoonist and advertising guy. His blog is extremely popular and his work is hilarious and often poignant. There are a lot of takeaways in this book for those of us who have “lost our crayons” as MacLeod might say, that is, for the adults who have either tried to make a living through their creative impulses (and failed) or those who considered such endeavors to be childish and haven’t indulged in them since before high school. People working in the business world will likely take away different advice than those in education, but as a teacher and writer I found myself both challenged and inspired by the overall message.

Here are a few excerpts that struck me personally as being important:

“Your wee voice doesn’t want you to sell something. Your wee voice wants you to make something. It’s the creative act that matters.” (This reminds me of the difference in the classroom between focusing on the learning rather than the result — on student writing, for example, rather than on the finished product — and on the teaching rather than the test score). 

“If you try to make something for a hypothetical market, you will fail. If you make something special and honest and powerful and true, you will succeed.” (Having worked over the years at writing novels, short stories, and screenplays, I believe him. Every time I start to think ‘what would [fill in the blank] want to read/buy/produce, I find my creativity shrink into a little packet of ‘can’t.’ The market is an idea killer. So what is an idea killer for my students? Grades? Points? Bubble tests? It would be interesting to try to find the correct correlation here. And then what to do about it?)

“By scuppering all hope of worldly and social betterment from the creative act, you are finally left with only one question to answer: do you make this damn thing exist or not?” (First of all, I have to like a man that uses the word “scuppering” in any context. I’ve never read the word but I know instantly what it means. Weird. Second, this is a powerful idea. So many times I find myself weighed down by what I want the results of my creativity to accomplish. I want my writing to make me famous, rich, popular and I want it to improve the lives of people who read it and better the world. Phew. I never realized how much weight that puts on my poor little creative impulse. Strip those weights away and the creative act becomes simple and clear: to be or not to be.)

Obviously, good teaching is not exactly the same as good writing or drawing, etc… There has to be some emphasis on results; process must be balanced with product to ensure students are progressing. But this book reminds me of the inherent value that exists in the creative act, and it reopened a desire in me that I’ve felt since my earliest days as a young child to make things. It brought back memories of long afternoons playing with molding clay, writing stories, drawing illustrations, weaving lanyards and macrame plant holders, playing pretend, creating, writing and starring in my sixth grade play… I did these things for fun, back before I started to take myself too seriously. Reading this book reminded me what creativity is and is not. 

I think my students want to make things, too.

(photo credit: “Creative Hands” by dalydose on Flickr)

One blog I’m following with much interest this week is at this one. It’s a blog being written by a group of 35 high school journalism teachers taking part in an ASNE fellowship in Arizona. I have it on my reader and am really enjoying the news coming out of the conference each day because I will be heading for a 12-day ASNE conference in Columbia, Missouri, in mid-July. The blog is giving me a great perspective on the kinds of training, lectures and activities to expect.

It is interesting to learn that some of the teachers are reluctant bloggers, while others seem quite comfortable. I think those with journalism backgrounds take to blogging more easily, which makes sense. They are used to producing “news” and sharing information.

When I was a reporter, I was given a weekly column (at age 23!) which I wrote for the next ten years. I could write about anything that interested me, and so it was basically blogging but in print. It was prestigious at the time because only a handful of journalists in the newsroom were selected to write a column, and I was certainly the youngest and also the only female.

Now, writing a column for the newspaper has less prestige because the internet has opened the door wide to everyone who wants to speak out. There’s still the matter of finding an audience, of course, and a newspaper helps provide that, but some of the most popular blogs (and profitable ones) are produced by independent writers who came up with a good idea and worked it well. Their publicity grew and they are now media companies in their own right.

The wonder of the internet is that you can write in a tiny niche space and sometimes find a sustainable audience that is unbounded by geography and time. Sometimes when I run across a great blog post, I spend hours going back through the years-old posts on the site before adding the address to my Google reader. You couldn’t do that with a great newspaper column 10 years ago. Blogs live forever.

[Photo credit: "Blogs" by dalequetepego on Flickr]