Hitting the Highlights: Top 10 Things That Were Great About This Year

See? I'm not always such a cynical bastard.

1. Teaching students about national tragedies. I love how that sounds just really sick and twisted. But this year in journalism I turned my attention to how large-scale events are covered. One was the Virginia Tech massacre, which was a discussion not of the tragedy of the event but the media coverage. Much earlier in the year, I did a three-week mini-unit on September 11 that focused on not just the media coverage and bias/non-bias in the media but the cultural aspect of it. Over the summer I'll probably do an entire entry or two as a "stuff that works" thing because I was really proud of what I did with that unit.

2. Being jealous of next year's yearbook staff. One of the things I'm pretty determined to do as I leave my school is make sure that the 2009 yearbook staff is as off and running as they can be. So far, they're doing what I hoped, as they have templates completed and a cover idea. The cover and theme idea is really cool and even little stuff like the folio looks pretty wicked. I told next year's editor-in-chief that although leaving for another school was the right decision, personally, I was definitely jealous that I wasn't going to be the adviser on what's definitely going to be a kickass book next year.

3. A Raisin in the Sun. I started teaching this last year when I didn't like the core texts on our 11th grade reading list, but this year it really came together. The students connected with the text, and had a fun time reading it in class. We were also able to do some higher-level stuff with the play--connecting it to popular culture in a way that goes beyond simple comprehension of the plot, something I rarely got out of my inclusion students. As a bonus, their scores on the unit test were through the roof.

4. Co-teaching a lesson on bias in the media. Though it was rushed and constantly interrupted by my SOL proctoring obligations, I thought that Penelope and I did a pretty good job.

5. Contributing to another English teacher's To Kill a Mockingbird unit. She was teaching Mockingbird right around the time the Jena 6 controversy was taking place in Louisiana. Despite the local paper's neglect of the story, it was pretty well-covered and I was able to send a few political cartoons, some stories from the Washington Post, and even the video to John Mellencamp's song, "Jena," her way. In fact, I wound up covering her class the day she showed it ... good timing, that.

6. Centering my Journalism I bias in media lessons around "news" in the Free-Lance Star. Because it's fun to point out how horrible that paper is.

7. Putting together a killer last issue of the student newspaper. I wasn't too wild about the cover, but I thought our content was solid and was genuinely touched by the tribute my staff had put together.

8. Watching the seniors who were on my original yearbook staff graduate. They started as yearbook staffers the year I started teaching and while this is really sentimental, their graduating really is special because they're the first group of students I really came to know for more than the course of a single school year. Lasting impressions and all that.

9. The Things They Carried. We did this as an after-SOL assignment in English and I felt that at least a few of my students, who normally wouldn't give a crap, actually enjoyed reading it. Then again, when you have images like necklaces made of human tongues and people getting getting shot straight through the head, you're bound to get someone interested. Seriously, though? I think that Tim O'Brien's book should be on a lot more English curricula. It's engaging and topical, especially to a generation that's become the face of the latest war.

10. The photojournalism moviemaker project. This is another that will get the "stuff that works" treatment, but I had my students research famous news photographs and then record narration for their photo in what became a 50-minute lesson on the history and importance of those pictures. Definitely something I enjoyed showing and they enjoyed watching when it was done.

Well, graduation is today, and then there are four days of underclass exams followed by a work day and I'm done with teaching here. More to come on that.