What We Miss

Professor Karyn Smith held on as long as she could.

She scheduled her maternity leave to start only about a week before she was due to give birth at the end of April. Although the physical changes became obvious, her energy level never seemed to drop. She probably could have kept teaching right up through labor without missing a beat. We wouldn’t have known the difference until we heard an infant’s cry from behind her desk.

Realistically, though, we knew she would have to leave before that.

A week before Smith’s departure, she and I sat in her office planning the last few weeks of the semester. A few days before, we had independently brainstormed lists of concepts we wanted to cover or reinforce in the limited time left.

My initial list looked like this:

Things to Go Over

- Quotation Methods

- Attribution, Including Use of “Said”

- Paragraphing

- AP Style

- Editorializing and Objectivity

- Balance (and False Balance)

- Assessing Sources, Fact-checking

- Digital Journalism – Differences and Similarities, Strategies for Horizons

- Ethics

I next whittled the list down to those items that mattered most:

- Paragraphing: Although many of the students had shortened their paragraphs while writing the April issue, many still had significant questions about where to break up long strings of sentences.

- Editorializing and Objectivity: I had noticed a number of articles written ostensibly from an objective point of view would conclude with a single paragraph exhorting readers to “go do such-and-such!” Large cuts had to be made to one article in which the student kept shifting from an objective tone to an editorial tone.

- Digital Journalism: Students had expressed a desire to do more with Horizons in the online space. We were already considering ways to make that happen in the future. To do it well, though, they would have to learn some of the conventions unique to online journalism.

Smith brought her own list, which included some of the same items as mine. With the remaining weeks on the schedule as our guide, we created an outline for what she would cover and what we hoped Professor Cindy Boynton would cover:

CINDY

- Quotation methods & attribution--use of “said”

- Paragraphing

- AP Style

KARYN

- Objectivity in reporting/assessing sources

- looking at other student newspapers--review them?

- emails?

- editing?

Cindy Final Project Ideas:

- Digital Journalism--differences and similarities, strategies for Horizons

- how dj is different

- source incorporation

- pictures

We probably wouldn’t even get through all those lessons. I expressed my frustration to Smith that it seemed like there was still so much to do.

“I’ve learned that you have to be okay with the fact that you can never cover everything,” she told me.

It was good advice, and I suppose I’ll have to learn to be comfortable with those limitations. There are only so many hours. They have to be split between instruction, discussion and production.

If I could, I’d sit down with these people and continue this educational journey indefinitely. That must be how those who pursue careers in education feel.

But reality will always intrude. People have lives. Smith loves her job, but she also has a personal sphere – one that now involves a baby, who takes precedence.

We all must eventually move on, even if it means missing a few things.