My life in the journalism teaching trenches ...

I never thought I’d spend more than 30 years teaching, and more than 20 years as a scholastic journalism adviser.

But here I am.

I was on my yearbook staff in high school, and I enjoyed it. But the writing process was laborious – anyone out there remember electric typewriters, whiteout and rubber cement? – and I wasn’t terribly fond of doing multiple drafts. In college, I fell in love with history, economics and political science and found a major – social science – that let me do a little of all three. When I finished, I decided to pursue a teaching credential. I hadn’t grown up thinking I’d necessarily be a teacher, but I enjoyed the classroom as a student, and after being invited to speak to a large group of peers in my senior year of high school, I knew I enjoyed public speaking. So … teaching could work for a while. But I thought I might eventually go to law school and work in public policy or politics or for the state.

And then computers showed up. I bought a used KayPro … a huge, clunky device that had a four-inch screen with phosphorescent green glowing letters. And suddenly, with the genius and magic of the cut-and-paste function, doing rewrites and revisions of manuscripts was dramatically easier than in the old days. I put together an opinion piece about my early teaching experience and sent it to the San Jose Mercury News – and the editors there bought it. That was it – I was a writer. I started crafting magazine story pitches, and soon I was hired by the local newspaper in Santa Cruz County as a sports stringer, a freelancer, to cover high school football and other sports. Twenty-five bucks a game, plus $5 for compiling the game statistics. Eventually, the Sentinel’s sports editors let me write about pretty much anything I wanted – they’d pitch me an idea, and I would grab it. I’d pitch them an idea, and they’d grab it. It was lots of fun – I ended up doing features and game stories on the local community college’s football, men’s and women’s basketball and baseball teams; some Cal and Stanford football; and even some San Francisco 49ers football (yes, I’ve seen Joe Montana naked in the 49ers’ locker room). 

All the while, I was still teaching and still enjoying it. I’d even gotten my first taste of journalism advising at the junior high where I taught – including one year in which the newspaper and yearbook were produced in my classroom during the same period and by the same group of students. But I was considering leaving the teaching profession to pursue my own love for writing and journalism. I applied to a bunch of graduate journalism schools and eventually ended up at the University of Missouri as a teaching editor – my sportswriting and education experience helped me snag a job as the assistant sports editor of the Columbia Missourian, a small daily newspaper that’s linked to the M.U. School of Journalism and serves as a print newspaper laboratory for undergraduate and graduate students. I was still working with students, editing and refining their work, but I also helped manage a sports section that tried to watchdog the M.U. athletics department as well as cover two smaller colleges, two high schools and various other community sports and activities.

In 1991, after my daughter was born, my wife and I decided to return to Northern California. I took a teaching job at a middle school – and I had a chance to advise a middle school newspaper (a newsletter, really) for which the “staff” of students completely changed every six weeks as part of a rotating elective. The Seahawk Sentinel was my second taste of advising, but for the first time I began to think I might have a bit of a knack for this kind of work, and I had lots of fun with it – despite the fact that we had exactly one computer in my classroom.

After being pink-slipped, I spent the next year at a different middle school, and I helped advise a simple newspaper at that school. I was also interviewing for journalism jobs – the Fresno Bee almost hired me, then held off because of budget restrictions. I interviewed in Connecticut and was offered a job as a sports editor at a mid-sized daily, but I decided that was too far from my family in Northern California. Then in 1993, I accepted a job at Oak Ridge High in the Sacramento suburbs to teach U.S. history, government and economics. Three years later, I was named the newspaper adviser there – and my first-ever high school newspaper won a Pacemaker Award. The next year, we were finalists.

In 1998, I came to Granite Bay High specifically to take on the newspaper adviser’s position, plus some government and economics classes to fill out my schedule. Since then, my students have won tons of individual and staff awards, and the Gazette has consistently competed for the most prestigious scholastic journalism prizes in the nation – Crowns, Pacemakers and Gallups. I’ve been honored along the way as well.

But in the back of my mind, I’ve sometimes wondered whether I made the right choice. On tough days, part of me has wondered if I should have gone ahead and sent in those law school applications, or taken that journalism gig in Connecticut.

A few years ago, I posted a status update on my Facebook page announcing that the Gazette had won a  Pacemaker Award at the national convention in San Antonio. I gave a shout-out to my former editors, and I thanked the students on that year’s staff, as well as other staffs who came before them. Almost immediately, there was lots of celebratory banter from current and former staffers, and then an old friend of mine from Santa Cruz, where I started my teaching and journalism careers, added a comment that brought me to tears. She said in part:

“Karl, I remember when we were all younger and searching out what we felt led to pursue. You were so torn between teaching and journalism. I love that the balance of the two has been such a great fit for you and you have excelled in a way that either without the other would have been so much less.”

That’s just exactly right.

I find so much joy and satisfaction in giving bright, talented students the opportunity to produce meaningful, important work for an audience of hundreds or thousands instead of just one teacher, or one set of classmates. I’ve seen it so often now that I have to force myself to not take it for granted, but the pride students have when they distribute the newspaper with their first-ever byline in it is utterly palpable.

Coaching students as they learn everything they need to know to make it happen – reporting, writing, editing, design, photography, ethics, press law and so much more – and then watching them as they go out and do it … it’s one of my life’s great joys.

I have a collection of little notes my newspaper students have written to me over the years. When I get irritated at the bureaucratic requirements of life in a public school, or when I get demoralized by the aspersions cast at teachers by opportunistic politicians and an ill-informed public, I sometimes pull out that file and read through a few of them. And they never fail to change my attitude, for they are full of youthful expressions of hope and joy and gratitude for the opportunity to do real, significant work even when they were still “just” high school students.

It turns out journalism advising sort of snuck up on me, almost by default and certainly with plenty of serendipity along the way. And yet here I am, more than 30 years into my teaching career, and with almost 25 years under my belt as a newspaper adviser, and I think my greatest contribution to student journalism is that I’m still here, that – as well as I know how – I’m still helping student journalists learn what it means to “go out and do good journalism.”

Every day, just like my friend Lorrie said on my Facebook page, I get to forge a balance between teaching and journalism – because either without the other would be so much less.

And that’s what makes teaching journalism and advising a high school newspaper the best thing I do.