The Most Valuable Class I Ever Had

A crucible of curiosity and creativity

In the fall of 2006 I began my sophomore year of high school. I was an undersized, reluctant high school football player unsure of who I was supposed to be or how I was supposed to fit in with all the different kinds of people I saw everyday—from the scene kids I sat next to in art class to the stereotypical upperclassmen jocks who made crude jokes in the locker room and quick work of me on the practice field after school.

Nervous Beginnings

After Christmas break that year, our four classes (we were on a block schedule) switched over to our spring semester schedule. One of my new classes was a unique one: newspaper.

I had always loved writing, for as long as I could remember. I was on the “newspaper” in fifth grade at my elementary school. I once tried to make a neighborhood newspaper in a Windows XP version of Microsoft Publisher. I started blogging on Livejournal in middle school. I generally did better in English classes than I did in math classes (this continued throughout my education).

But I wasn’t sure if I was cut out for a high school newspaper class.

Would I ever get to actually publish an article?

Maybe I’ll just edit or research or something.

Surely they have far better writers than me!

Will I cover sports or something else?

I did end up writing plenty of articles, but at this moment I could only probably name a couple off the top of my head. I also remember having a tech column at one point and covering the release of the first ever iPhone. I was the sports editor one year as well, but I remember dreading having to spend time attending sporting events after school to report on what happened.

Honestly, all of that pales in comparison to what that class did for me on a foundational level as a thinker, a communicator, and a person in general.

What newspaper class offered me was an opportunity to explore curiosity and creativity in ways that made me a better writer and communicator. But before we get into what made this class so transformative, I should provide a bit of context.

How Newspaper Class “Worked”

Our school newspaper, The Scroll, released monthly. And those of us on the staff of the newspaper often joked that three weeks out of the month we goofed around and one week out of the month we made a newspaper.

It was a joke, but it was true, too.

If memory serves, our poor, amazing teacher, Ms. Pamela O’Reilly (“Miss O” or “Musso” as we called her), spent the first few weeks of each semester teaching us some of the basics of journalism and how to print a monthly newspaper.

Then the rest of the semester she just tried her best to keep us on track to release a paper each month without kicking us out of class for being goofballs in the process.

I don’t recall newspaper being an “exclusive” or “honors” elective class, but I suspect that the limited slots on the newspaper staff were reserved for high-performing English students given the nature of the class and the caliber of the classmates I remember having. That didn’t mean we were necessarily any more well-behaved than your average English class, though.

If there’s anything worse than a full classroom of high school students screwing around every day, it’s a full classroom of honors English students screwing around every day.

We were insufferable, I am sure.

But Miss O shepherded us well from the enclosed, miniature office she occupied off the side of the main room, which was full of empty desks and bustling computer tables. You always knew your conversation got a bit too crude or loud when she would shout, “Hey I heard that!” or poke her head out from her office to give a menacing look following by a knowing smile.

About those conversations—they weren’t always marked by their oft-inappropriate bent or high volume. They were often constructive.

A Crucible for Formative Conversation

I went to a pretty big public high school with roughly 500-600 students per grade. When I joined newspaper class in the spring of my sophomore year, I was among the youngest students in the class given that it was about the earliest I was allowed to join.

This was unique because virtually all of my other classes were either with one of the other 600 students in my grade or someone who was a grade ahead of me that had to re-take the class. On top of that, at least in my high school, most classes were not built for lots of student conversation.

Of course there were days we would form groups in a science class for an experiment or in a social studies class to discuss a world history event.

But, for the most part, and like most schools, the vast majority of my time in class each day was centered around lectures given by teachers with minimal (permitted) student interaction…until the bell rang for passing period, of course.

Contrast that with newspaper class.

As a sophomore in high school, I spent the first 90 minutes of my day sitting in front of a Mac computer talking with juniors and seniors about a new article we found on Digg or the latest innovation from Silicon Valley we read about on ArsTechnica.

Our newspaper classroom had about a dozen of these

Of course we would also banter about other more menial teenage topics, school drama and the like. But it’s not like our conversations were consumed by the same kind of gossip that often floats around high school lunch tables and lockers. A lot of the students in newspaper class came from different cliques within the school—emo kids, jocks, and more—which meant not all “gossip” was relevant to everyone, and so it took a back seat to other conversations around world events or shared interests.

In Miss O’s newspaper class, we had crucibles of formative conversation that were largely absent from our other more homogenous, lecture-based environments. By having conversations with juniors and seniors when I was a sophomore and a junior, I had the opportunity to learn in ways no book or teacher could provide.

I wasn’t cool enough to hang out with those older students after school was out, but in newspaper class, I was treated like an equal and given a seat at the computer table alongside everyone else.

A Blank Canvas for Curiosity and Creativity

Newspaper was always in first period, as I alluded to above. What a glorious class to have first thing in the morning, by the way, never having to fear a pop quiz as soon as you sit down for the day.

When I was a junior, I became close with another student—a senior—named Chadi. Chadi’s family owned a Marathon gas station and convenience store on the other side of town that Chadi, as a high school student, led as its general manager (at least in function).

Every day after school and on the weekends, Chadi went to the gas station to work. He often spent time in the summer and on breaks attending conventions or trade shows for convenience store items like candy or what-have-you. He didn’t just ring people up—he managed inventory, the whole deal.

Getting to spend my junior year sitting next to Chadi, talking with him, learning about his business, and having other big-picture, adult-life kinds of conversations was life-changing for me. He taught me more than I ever thought there was to know about managing a gas station—like that most gas stations don’t even make money on actual gasoline, among other things—and life in general.

Beyond working alongside Chadi that year, both of my final two years in newspaper class served as a blank canvas for curiosity and creativity for me.

Hanging out with my peers for 90 minutes each morning around those Mac computers amid the advent of the social internet is, I think, the most formative educational experience I ever had.

Here are some things I was doing each morning those three weeks out of the month that we weren’t producing a paper:

• I learned to track and trade stocks through a website that let you learn with fake money.

• I set up my Twitter account for the first time in 2007.

• I watched the reveal of the first ever iPhone, and many subsequent Steve Jobs keynotes.

• I logged onto Reddit every Thursday morning to join in the theory discussions on the LOST subreddit.

• I learned how to do graphic design in Photoshop, more often making dumb memes than actually making graphics for the paper.

• I learned how to edit CSS in WordPress and tinker with HTML on various websites.

None of those things were part of any sort of “newspaper curriculum” that didn’t exist.

Of course on top of all of this I learned to write more effectively, edit my own work and others’, and layout pages in Adobe InDesign—a tremendously useful skill I unfortunately haven’t had the need to use since then.

Newspaper didn’t just teach me how write articles and put together a newspaper—though it did teach me those things.

What newspaper taught me was how to be an adult. It taught me about real life in a way no biology or geometry class ever did.

I had so many awesome teachers and classes over the years as a teenager, truly.

Mr. Birkenbeul took me seriously in his eighth grade social studies class and treated me like the adult I wanted to be.

Mr. Houser taught me how to think and communicate like someone who has thoughts worth hearing.

Sr. Miller reminded me of all of the different ways learning can be fun, even when it just feels like endless repetition.

Ms. Roof helped me see language beyond its pragmatic uses and as true, beautiful art in the form of literature.

All of those teachers, and plenty more, radically shaped me as a teenager and played a significant role in my development to this day.

But Miss O and her impact over the two-and-a-half years I had her as a teacher had very little to do with what she said or how she taught us. It had everything to do with the kind of environment she created that allowed us to think for ourselves, sharpen each other, and become the kind of people we one day hoped to be.

A couple of years ago, Susie and I found ourselves in Fort Wayne over Christmas break such that Snider High School was still in session. A friend of mine is an English teacher there now, and I asked if I could come visit him after school one day and walk around. I hadn’t been in the building in over a decade.

We slipped into the newspaper room shortly after the school day had ended.

The computers are gone, but Miss O isn’t.

“Hey Miss O!” I said as we walked into the classroom.

“Who is that?” she exclaimed as she poked her head out of the little office off to the side of the room.

I smiled. So did she.