John Glenn

*Warning: Unless you're in Literary Journalism class or have read "The Right Stuff" by Tom Wolfe, you probably won't get this post.  I'm just writing it so I won't forget the scenario since it was such a funny class period.  Just know there's a lot of inside jokes in our class from that book about the Mercury seven (first men in space).

At the start of Literary Journalism class today Audrey came in to interview us and Dr. Nash about the class for an article she's writing for the Communicator (the SJ&C's newsletter).  Before she could ask any questions, Dr. Nash showed us his new iPad he just bought on Monday night.  He passed it around the class, or tried to.  He gave it to Emily and she had it for most of the time Audrey was interviewing us.  The most amusing part of watching her try out the iPad was when she played some marble game (I don't know the actual name) and had to use her whole upper body to keep the marble moving right.  "Wow, this is a lot harder to play on here than on an iPod," she remarked.

Audrey's questions were pretty easy to answer and we took turns giving her quotes.  Rainey answered one question and did so very eloquently.  She's got a great way with words, both written and spoken (which is a real skill, in my opinion).  When she was done her answer, Chris smirked at her, "Thanks John Glenn."  Every person in the room burst out in laughter, except for Audrey who smiled while looking a bit confused.  "Chris, stop it," Rainey said sheepishly.  Chris grinned down at Rainey while raising both his hands in the air (like elementary students do when they REALLY want the teacher to pick them) and then made his hands into "thumbs up."  Then suddenly Dr. Nash said, "Oh, John Glenn!  Oh, that's funny!" and really started laughing, which made us all laugh even harder.  It's always amusing when people laugh before they actually realize the joke.  Emily joined in, while still keeping her eyes glued to the iPad screen, "We should get a picture of Rainey with her hands up like that."  "Ya," Dr. Nash added.  "Just a picture of Rainey beside the story."  "Wait," I said, "There's seven of us and there were seven of them.  We could all pretend to be one of the Mercury seven at the press conference."  Dr. Nash turned to Chris, who had started the whole thing.  "Who would you be? Al Shepard?"  "No," Rainey countered.  "Emily would be Shepard since she's always been ahead of the rest of us in getting her drafts done."  "I think Chris would be Yaeger even though he wasn't one of the seven," Angela said.  Aimee added, "OK, we really need to get this picture taken before the school year ends."

Poor Audrey must have felt left out.  "Well, my next question was going to be, Because this class is so small, are the dynamics different?, but I think you've already answered that one," she said.  The six of us students looked around the table and realized what an awesome class we were in.  "I think so," Angela pipped up.  "I feel like we're a family in here.  We all help each other out about our articles.  I mean, Rainey and Alison have fixed me up with dates for my project.  We've talked together about each person's topic and I think we have a special bond."  I agreed with Angela and I think the other four students and Dr. Nash did too.

I love having small classes where everyone knows everyone else and gets along and helps each other.  Emily and I had that last year in our six-person, all-girls Adv. Reporting class with Ms. Chamberlain and now we have it again with Dr. Nash in Literary Journalism.  LJ (Angela's acronym for our class) class today just made me realize again how much I'll miss the SJ&C once I graduate and leave.

PS - After Emily had got to level 4 of her marble game, she passed the iPad to me and Angela who worked on a Mad Lib game.  We got all the way to the last word and just needed to put in an adverb when Dr. Nash needed his iPad to read us an e-mail he'd gotten.  So we never got to see how our Mad Lib turned out, but it was going to be good.  Like Angela said, "We used the word gobbleygook.  How could it not be good?"

Accent happenings

Today was by far the most stressful day of this semester for me. Actually, it very well could have been the most stressful day of this school year, which might also have the potential of being my most stressful day of post-secondary education. And I'm going to stop there and not go back any farther back in my education history.

So, I had been having a hard time trying to track down the right people to interview for my news story for this week. I was invited along to a golden-opportunity group interview of eight of Southern's Haitian students last Friday night after vespers. I got the e-mail about an hour before vespers started and was struggling with the idea in my mind. On the one hand, it would be great to just go and meet the students and get information from them about how their families and friends in Haiti are doing since the earthquake. On the other hand, I felt like doing that would be bordering on work and I really wanted to have a nice relaxing start to the Sabbath. I felt like going to the interview would disrupt my time with God. So I signed out of my Southern e-mail and spent the time I could have been interviewing for my story listening to a couple sermons on AudioVerse. I think that was the right choice for me at that time.

Anyway, back to my today-story. I had tried to contact the guy who invited me for the interview to ask him for some names of students I could talk to for my story and he eventually got back to me, on Monday night. So I had to try to arrange for all the interviews on Tuesday. In between calling to set up interview times I worked on my first draft of my Advanced Creative Writing piece. I just wrote it totally stream of consciousness and felt like it was terrible, but I just needed to get the thoughts and memories all down before trying to clean the article up. Finally I had all my interviews scheduled and I finished my draft just before having to leave for class.

After class I raced to the top floor of the music building where I got out my computer and did a really helpful interview with Pastor Brennon. I had been trying to track him down all day. In the morning he wasn't in his office and when I called back in the afternoon he had just come into the Campus Ministries office, but immediately went into a meeting so I asked the secretary to see if he could talk to me at 4:45 p.m., just before orchestra. We had a great interview and he told me lots of really great stuff. In fact, after that interview I thought I could probably write an entire article on just the information he gave me (although, as any good reporter knows, writing an article using only one source is just a recipe for disaster). By the time we said good-bye, I was 10 minutes late for orchestra so I rushed downstairs and got my violin out as fast as I could. We practiced with a bunch of the soloists for our Concert Concert in a couple Sundays. Our rehearsal with the last soloist went over our normal ending time and Mrs. Minner said that anyone who absolutely had to leave, could. I did have to leave so I went back upstairs and did the interviews with the Haitian students that I had contacted earlier that afternoon. Both of the interviews were pretty short, but each students gave me tons of excellent quotes and many terribly sad facts. I told each of them that I would pray for their families, especially the ones they haven't heard from yet.

When those interviews were done, I raced over to the Accent office and started furiously writing up my story. It took me more than two hours to have it fully completed. There was just so much information that I had to wade through to find the most newsworthy and relevant-to-our-campus facts. When I finally finished the story it was more than 630 words, but the copyeditor helped me pare it back down to less than 600, which I think made it a stronger story. Then there was another issue I had to take care of. Let's just say that a SJ&C professor told me he would have a student in his class write an article for me and when I got that "article" I found out it was really a press release. The editor and I finally got that situation figured out and started to breathe again. After that I read over and edited all the rest of the pages and got done by 11 p.m. Then I still had to do an interview with a guy from my speech class for our introduction speech we have to do tomorrow. I'm not sure how I got it all done, but somehow I did. I'm so thankful that the News Reporting class is now going to be writing stories for the Accent issues from now on. It takes a lot of the pressure of finding at least eight writers every week off me.

Ways of thinking

Topic 1: Critical Thinking vs. Creative Thinking
(a continuation of yesterday's post)

While I have the challenge of doing both creative writing and AP style news writing this semester, there's more to the situation. Curious? OK, here it is...I have basically two types of classes this semester: Classes that require critical thinking (World Religions, Principles of Entrepreneurship, Intro to Web Design and Symphony Orchestra) and classes that require creative thinking (Survey of Children's Literature, Creative Writing, Web Design and Symphony Orchestra). I'll bet you noticed that two of my classes overlap into both categories. It's true. I have two classes that definitely apply to the critical thinking category and two others that certainly belong to the creative thinking one. But then there are the other two, the odd-balls, the ones that belong in both categories. In Intro to Web Design we have to think creatively to design our Web sites, but then when we start using Dreamweaver to turn the designs into HTML, we use critical thinking. In orchestra we use critical thinking to read the notes and understand all the things contained in the music, but then we have to interpret what we read from head-knowledge into feeling and passion. Of course, someone could argue that both creative and critical thinking are required for every class. Yeah, yeah, we all know that, but it's not really what I'm trying to say in this post. I'm just saying it's intriguing to see such an equal split between my six classes and interesting how I have to adjust my thinking before I step into each classroom. What makes it all the more challenging is that my critical-type thinking classes are pretty much perfectly alternating with my creative-type thinking classes. It's just kind of a weird phenomenon I've noticed so far this semester.

And, in other news, I just got done interviewing a Collegedale city commissioner at his house. I think that's a rather an unordinary claim to fame and one that I'll probably never get to have in my own hometown. The interview went really great, so I'm excited about that. Can you tell?!

Library

I walked into the library five times today. Actually it's really been five times just since noon. I think I spend way too much time in the library. I usually go in there if I only have an hour between classes and don't want to go all the way back to my apartment just to come back to class a bit later. I also go there to use the computers or get on the Internet. The computers come in handy if I have an improptu interview and need to quickly type up some interview questions. Usually I use the library's Internet to check my Southern e-mail, write e-mails to Southern Accent staff or track down contact information for a source I'm trying to get a hold of for a story I'm either writing or verifying. Today I was in the library doing all those things. I'm glad we have a library at Southern. I'm not sure what I'd do without it. Plus, now that there's all those neat paintings of planes (and most of them are orange, my favourite colour) decorating the walls near the entryway I've got something interesting to look at!

Changing Tastes

This week I realized how much I've changed since the start of fall semester last year. Last fall I was terrified to take News Reporting class and get my articles published in the Southern Accent (with my name attached no less!). Last fall I took News Reporting and ended up not hating it...too much. Last winter I was super-terrified to take Advanced Reporting and go out into the community to find stories. Last winter I took Advanced Reporting and enjoyed it...mostly. Last year I loved writing articles, but hated doing interviews and research and fact checking. Last year I pushed myself to do all those things and grew from the experiences.

This year things are different. I have a new challenge. This year my reporting classes are behind me. This year I'm the News Editor of the Southern Accent (who would have guessed at this time last year?!). This year I organize and edit articles from the current News Reporting class. And I realized this week that, most astonishing to me, this fall I'd rather do all the information gathering than actually write up my articles. How do things change so completely in just one year?