A New Career Path

Four years ago, I was completely over being in high school. I graduated and had no plans to come back. I was going to go to college, get my journalism degree and try to make a living in a newsroom. Surely by 2009, the media would figure out how to make money off that whole Internet thing. (Oops.)

During my freshman year of college, I started working for an organization that shall go unnamed, but basically it involved me working a lot journalism advisers and their students. Being in contact with them and reading (and later on, critiquing) their publications made me realize a few things:

1. Journalism advisers are pretty cool people. And pretty much the opposite of journalists as far as attitudes go.
2. The kids are pretty cool, too.
3. There are some darn good publications out there.
4. There are some publications that fail to challenge the students to reach their full potential. And this drives me CRAZY.
5. I wanted to teach the papers that were falling short how to kick some major butt.
6. The skills you get in journalism class are helpful even if you aren't going into journalism, and more kids need them.

Around the same time, I also realized that being a journalist was never going to challenge me like teaching could. I am not the type of person who does well when everything becomes boring or routine. By the time my last internship was wrapping up, I was not enjoying it as much.

After trying (and failing) to get into Teach for America, I ultimately got a separate teaching job offer last spring -- taking on journalism and photojournalism classes, advising the newspaper and yearbook and coaching journalism competitors -- enrolled in an alternate certification program and spent a summer saying goodbye to the newsroom. I took my journalism certification exam and pondered what I had committed myself to.

In August, I showed up to in-service, started setting up the classroom and asked far too many questions. I had some doubts. Could I really handle advising a newspaper staff that basically amounts to .1 percent of the school's population? How the heck could I teach the yearbook kids to sell ads when I hated doing that when I was in their position? And how many people would refuse to listen to me because I've been mistaken for a high school student?

I reached Monday without a major case of nerves. The classroom was as ready as it could be. I had a plan. I couldn't do much more than that.

The first two classes were rough. Beyond a few, very smart chatterboxes, many students didn't want to talk. (Did I really get the first quiet class in the history of teaching?) Several didn't pay attention, but I didn't take that personally. By my third journalism class of the day, I had figured out a way to keep most of the class engaged. They really got interested when we started talking about their media consumption habits, the coverage of Michael Jackson's death, and why they are more interested in celebrity news rather than "regular" news. They offered up really smart answers. By my fourth class of the day, I had my best -- and most awake -- group yet.

It wasn't easy. I had to think quickly when they had no questions about the syllabus, my rules and discipline policy, the new lunch times and so on. I had to deal with awkward silence from my non-talkers. Oh, and apparently my pants zipper was halfway down all of first period.

But I made it without thinking once that this was a mistake. (The shoes I wore, on the other hand ...) I know there are some kids who will be engaged and some kids who aren't, and I can deal with that. And I learned that the yearbook and newspaper kids are just as awesome as any other school's.

I'm waiting for the anvils to start falling ...