Jason Wallestad

Every year I struggle with how to grade my journalism students –– they all have different responsibilities and assignments, and there just isn’t an easy formula for grading all the things they do.  Some students write, some take pictures, some design pages, some copyedit, and some lead and coordinate –– none of it translates easily into points.  And to make it even harder, my school’s grading software is built around two main assumptions: one is that the entire class is doing the exact same thing at the exact same time, and the other is that everything accomplished in a classroom can be reduced to points in the first place.

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Arthur Boyle joined my Journalism class as a senior –– he had taken my AP Comp class last year, and during spring registration, I badgered him enough about taking journalism the following year that he finally gave in.  I love it when AP Comp students join the journalism class as seniors –– they offer a perspective and maturity that I don’t always see right away with sophomore and junior writers, and they have a grasp of voice and narrative timing that younger writers just don’t have.  They’re also used to coming up with their own ideas and challenging the status quo.

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With every student I’ve taught, the writing process varies––some students can write beautiful first drafts and some require dozens of drafts to get there.  Critiquing a story, like writing one, is an art, and the writing teacher’s and editor’s job is to sense the needs of each writer and help him or her build a writing process that works.  No matter the writer’s skill, I’ve found that the start of effective revision happens when there’s a classroom culture where writers allow their first drafts to be ugly, awkward, and imperfect things, where they recognize that the first draft is about exploration and possibilities.  

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My journalism students have been publishing an online edition for five years now, and it’s only in the last two years that they’ve really figured out how to do it right.  When we first launched our website, it was a novelty, an afterthought, a place where we deposited our stories after they were printed, hoping they might get a few more readers.  Even after several years, the print edition’s needs continued to dominate almost every aspect of our work and production. 

It makes sense that the print edition maintained this central role––it offers a tangible, real experience that can’t be replaced by a website.  There’s a physical presence to the newspaper: students feel its heft in their hands as they walk around the school, handing it to their readers and seeing their immediate reactions.  They return from distribution with ink-stained hands and begin to flip through the final product themselves with a sense of accomplishment and pride.

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