How this all started

That day’s lecture: Short news stories. I checked off my class prep list: a class roll, a slide show updated for a new semester, a group activity already shared via Google, and my example stories pulled up for quicker screen sharing in Zoom. I was ready.

 At least until I realized all my example stories were from 2012. For me, 2012 seems like yesterday, but I knew my students would be trying figure out if they were still in elementary school when I last updated my lecture.

These were good examples and it had taken me several hours to collect them initially, so I hadn’t updated them. Why waste time searching for things I already had when I could spend that time on grading or writing test questions or looking for short YouTube videos I could share in class?

Plus I had 30 minutes before class, not hours. And I knew any new examples I might find would read exactly like these examples from 2012 so again why bother?

Because I am obsessive like that. And because I clearly remember taking a literature class my senior year from a man who taught class every week from notes on yellowed paper with visible bulges from the typewriter keystrokes. I didn’t think how great those lectures must be that he gives them over and over again every decade. I though “Really? Your lecture notes are so old they’ve yellowed??”

I knew my 2012 examples would read the same way. I tried to Google some things quickly, and scanned the three most recent papers for good examples. I found one I could use. But hey, it was from that semester.

That’s the point at which I also decided that once the semester was over, I needed to start a blog. To help me collect recent examples that I could share with my students, and to help other journalism instructors in their panic searches.