Teaching high school journalism?

I don't know where you are, but 200K for a house is stupid cheap.
I have friends here who make 100K and can't get a nice house in a nice neighborhood because those houses cost 350K+

 

It all depends where you live. Texas is dirt cheap. Virginia is all over the place. Pennsylvania and Michigan are next to nothing. DC is insane.

 

Just because you're hung over doesn't mean you're showing any signs of it.

 

tried my hand at teaching high school journalism and couldn't run fast enough after a short time. biggest problem was that most of the students took the class because it was considered a blowoff. i didn't have a degree in education or certification so i was on a program for emergency certification, which meant i had three years to get certified. i didn't teach english. my classes were intro to mass comm, newspaper, yearbook and broadcast. the paper was published once a month broadsheet and also served as the quasi-community paper because it was mailed to every home in the school district, which was a class 2a (second smallest enrollment size in texas) in a suburb just north of dallas.

 

I teach at a school with a rather prominent television station. Some of our teachers came into the job with alternative licenses and were able to teach while they pursued their license.

While I miss the hell out of sports, the job is pretty rewarding. It doesn't pay a ton, but it beats the hell out of what I was making and the time off is nice.

 

I don't know if I would feel comfortable with the idea of teaching high school journalism. There are scant few high school programs that teach kids anything remotely worth bringing to their college newspapers, and my experience from being on one of the college newspapers was that kids from their high school papers mostly had to learn on the job there.

Plus, you have to deal with principals and boards of education that will censor shit in the paper and/or the yearbook and you'll have little legal ground to stand on thanks to some less than favorable SCOTUS decisions...

If I were going to interview for such a position and I interviewed with the principal, I'd ask him point blank what his stance was on censorship. If he's like the guy who ran the high school I eventually graduated from, I'm running in the other direction because he was censorship happy. If he's like the guy at my previous high school, I'd consider it. That guy was less likely to censor shit than the journalism teacher was.

 

since high schools give kids nothing of value to take to college as far as journalism is concerned, then shouldn't there be more people with journalism experience teaching those classes? and if you were one of the first, wouldn't you be a fucking all-star?

on a side note: i could give two shits if some high school kid gets censored because his principal won't let him run a photo of his buddy flipping off the camera. most things principals "censor" is stupid shit that would get any one of us fired if we attempted to enter the same item in any one of our sections.

 

There's a fair amount of that but there's a lot more of principals censoring legitimate content that makes the school look bad, deals with sensitive topics, etc. Good high school papers are the exception rather than the rule, but there are some good student journalists out there having their work unfairly censored.

 

is it really "good" stuff. really? personally, i think a high school paper is on solid ground if it single spaces after periods much less breaking anything of content value.

 

It happens. Not much, but there are some people who know they want to be journalists in high school and take it seriously and sometimes they break stories. Or write about things the school would rather not be out there.

I know I wrote a couple things that made the faculty sponsor cringe when I was in high school, but our principal very rarely noticed what we were doing much less bothered to censor it.

 

You're right about the censorship. High school papers have zero freedom of speech. A good journalism teacher should be able to get past that, though. I let my kids know there are certain things they just can't write about in high school and certain topics that, while solid journalistically, are off limits here. That sucks, but it's the rule we have to play by in high school. We have still done a few projects that pushed the envelope: teen pregnancy, race issues. Besides that, though, I focus more on teaching the the fundamentals of writing and news gathering. How to interview subjects, where to go for information. Those are skills they will take with them and build upon in college.

 

I'll second what MacDaddy said. I see a lot of HS newspapers and there are maybe one or two in 100 that are worth a damn. The real problem that I can see is a combination of what Tom Petty and Mac are saying ... OK, so you've get a legit journalist in a HS setting, great. As Petty said, you'd be a hero, right? Not even close.

Said legit journalist starts teaching serious journalism practices to the kids, including the importance of covering hard news, damn what anybody thinks. The paper starts to do things that make the school look bad and actually inspire a few of the meathead students to think about things other than homecoming. Let's say there's a piece on drug use in the school, for instance. The principal knows he can censor, so it takes a pretty special person to not use that power when the newspaper is making the school look bad and making his/her life more difficult. Thus, the situation is damn near untenable for any real journalist.

Most schools do not want a serious journalism experience in HS. They want an "intro to" set up they can show the school board. It's better in college, but there is still quite a bit of pressure on college student journalists to "play ball." You'd be stunned -- stunned, I tell you -- to realize how many educated people on a college campus believe that the student newspaper should be -- or is -- a PR vehicle for the university's interests. They have no idea what the role of a newspaper in society should be and it's sad. The line between journalism and pr/marketing has been blurred to the point that even smart people don't get it anymore.