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| Linda, Marlo and Deborah work hard to meet deadline |
I look around at a group of English and Journalism teachers and see everyone struggling with at least one thing in their articles. We are older and more experienced than our students and we need help from others. This will be an important value for me to instill in my students. Ask for help, talk to others. It doesn't matter how old you are, you make mistakes. Bets are, Steve still finds a ton of mistakes in our writing EVEN with all this collaboration we're doing. But that's writing. We make mistakes. Hopefully, the first person catches them, but if they don't someone, somewhere along the line will - all we can do is
hope it's not our reader noticing the mistake after publication!
Yes, this has happened on every student issue my students have published and they are always shocked and awed that after 3 edits there are still mistakes :)
Sarah Noah
Goshen High School
Goshen, Indiana
What a great eye-opener this experience has been, Sarah. The kids do have a tough job...especially the perfectionists. Like you, we have CRAZY, mistakes overlooked after gazillion edits. The worst...a profile on a young man that plays the "base." Yup, we misspelled it 4 times in his profile. I hadn't checked the page because we were too close to deadline and the editor had assured me it was all good...she had checked it. Arghhh...the young man was horrified as he thought he'd been playing the bass all these years. Sigh... Debbie
ReplyDeleteOne thing that came out of the survey is that most of us have an English credential and less than a third have journalism experience. So look at it this way. How well would Steve do on a five-paragraph essay about some prompt on Romeo and Juliet?
ReplyDeleteThose who don't have a lot of journalism experience should expect a learning curve just like our kids have. But it's something you'll learn very quickly if you focus.
So the bottom line, at least to me, is Don't Worry; Be Happy.
-- Steve Caswell
Sarah, thanks for pointing out something that I noticed today while in the lab. Bidjan and I were bouncing phrasing off each other, Heather and I were collaborating about music in our video, etc. I had thoughts flying in my head about how we were collaborating, and that I was talking to myself, also, which Steve suggested. At the time, we had no "backchannel" going on, so I appreciate the chance to collaborate online about it now. Your post helped me verbalize the powerful lesson I learned (again) from the experience.
ReplyDeleteRhonda Dickens
Chisholm Trail High School
Fort Worth, Texas
Good post, Sarah. As someone who is a perpetual tinkerer when it comes to my writing, it is actually pretty liberating to be on deadline and just have to let it go.
ReplyDelete