Learning by failure

So I failed pretty badly Saturday. But I'll come back to that in a minute.

I just finished reading a friend's post on a journalism teacher/adviser listserve about how we're all expected to be experts at EVERYTHING, and that the impossible nature of that expectation is chasing talented folks from journalism classrooms, and in some cases from teaching altogether.

This is something I'm guilty of over the years. I have a graduate degree in journalism, and I know what good journalism needs to look and feel like. And yet I let myself, earlier in my advising career, get pulled into more hours in the lab, later deadline nights, more issues of the paper, more special coverage, more ... of everything. And it was taking a toll on me, and on my family. Not to the point of total dysfunction, but I had a nagging sense that I was putting my job and other people's children before my wife and my own children.

And so I finally decided, a few years ago, to start saying no. Nope, deadline isn't midnight anymore. Nope, we're not making an exception for pages that "only need a little more time." Sorry, a special edition isn't in the annual budget, and it's too late now to try to add it into the mix. 

And what I've learned (which took me a while, because I can be a little slow about some things), is that students will go over the bars we set for them. And the whining lasts about a year at the very most, because the generational cycle of the mostly juniors and seniors on my staff is ... duh ... two years. A change inevitably meets resistance from some seniors ("we've never done it that way!"), shoulder shrugs the next year ("I guess we did it that way last year") and acceptance after that ("we've always done it this way!"). 

The online and print news program I advise still manages to do mostly good journalism. We win some awards. I take kids to conventions from time to time. My students write me lovely notes at the end of the year, reflecting on their journalism experience.

Much more importantly, I'm still married (to the same woman!) and my own kids seem to think I'm worth their time and attention now and then. (Even Garrett, my 18-year-old high school senior, doesn't mind hanging with the old man from time to time, even though he's swamped this year with all the college application and financial aid stuff that seniors have to deal with. But I get it – that's what high school seniors have to do. I've been teaching them for almost 30 years, so I kind of know the drill.)

Oh, my Saturday failure? 

I'm a word guy. I've never learned all that much about photography, and I've never taken the time to really learn the mechanics of shooting a digital camera that's not set on "automatic." I can tell you when I'm staring at a good picture, and I can run down the list of some of the basics (rule of thirds, framing the shot, leading lines, get closer, change your angle, etc.) ... but I'm not really a photo teacher. I try to find a couple of kids who are already good photographers, and then I share a couple of my basic nuggets with them and let them run with the process. We get some pretty good results that way.

On Saturday, however, I was the designated photographer for my son Garrett's high school baseball team. I was shooting for myself and for the team, but also for Garrett's school yearbook. (It was the only game the team was playing before the page deadline, it was an away game an hour from home, and I was going to be there anyway. Hey, the dad who's the big-dog journalism teacher/adviser at the school across town can shoot a few pics. How hard can it be?)

But I was using my son's camera (he's also a yearbook staffer at his school and shoots with a pretty nice Canon), and I didn't know how to change his settings. Turns out his manual settings were for indoor baskeball in a dim gymnasium, and I was shooting in fog and then sunshine. I probably took 400 shots, and the ISO setting was at 1600 ... which means the photos were wildly overexposed and were essentially worthless. I was a little ticked at myself for making some of the same mistakes I try to tell my newspaper students to avoid. But then I remembered it's OK to not be an expert at everything. 

So the photo shoot was a failure. But I learned a few things, and next time will be better. 

It was an important reminder that we can only do what we can do today, and that needs to be good enough until tomorrow, when we'll be able to be a little better than we were yesterday.