Friday, May 25, 2018

Adviser health is worth thinking about


A real issue I see is advisers being defeated in their careers before they really can start, since we masochistically repeat over and over just how difficult the job is (and I have been saying this for years so I am part of the problem). You have to master not only all the intricacies of journalism but also of technology and design and social media and video and...

In other words: to be a great adviser you must be expert in everything, and it turns out that there are not many Aaron Manfulls and Jim Streisels out there. But is that fair?

I started a discussion with Colorado advisers during our annual winter professional development event, in which I asked them to forgive themselves for not being able to do it all.

I recommended becoming an expert in one thing (for me, it was writing, with print as the prime medium). Adviser "lifespan" has been brief and is getting briefer. All the pressure to "do it all" is either a) making that span even shorter, or b) producing loads of student work that gets lost in the chaos; or both.

Does anyone really believe that we can churn out young journalists who can be "expert" as writers, broadcasters, bloggers, designers, marketers, podcasters, and social media gurus? When you have to be great at everything, aren't we great at nothing? My quick take on media education is that we have forgotten the truth of "depth over breadth," and so we now see oceans of mediocre content coming from young people. And need I even bring up the same problem in the professional media?

Then came a recent JEA listserv discussion on the advisability (pretty good word for this, eh?) of taking on multiple publications and THAT got me thinking again about advisers needing to "forgive themselves" for not being expert in everything to do with student media.

My thinking on this can be traced to a 2011 blog post by Linda Holmes, host of "Pop Culture Happy Hour." It's worth reading and maybe sharing with students.

I continue to struggle for the right analogy here, but imagine being asked to be a high school teacher assigned a combined high-level science and English course ("It will really help in building the master schedule and there's an extra $500 in it for you," pleads the principal). It's not an exact comparison to advising yearbook AND video broadcast AND online, but a lot of advisers are trying to cram all those into one period per day.

I can see some hazy ways to proceed, but I would be inventing curriculum on the fly, spending many hours trying to get on top of the content, and trying to find a support community that could talk with me. I would face students each day who were talented in science and not so talented in analyzing literature, and vice versa. I would have to find some reasonable middle ground in terms of content and challenges for those students. Every day would be a bit frustrating, no matter how bright and dedicated those students were.

As several posters mentioned in the listserv discussion, there ARE times when teachers are forced to make extreme decisions due to enrollment pressure, scheduling pressure and more (e.g. in order to maintain ANY journalism at our school, we need to jam everyone into one class; or Spanish teachers jamming levels 3-5 into one class period in order to save the entire sequence). Depending on school size, it is still quite common for one person to advise all the media in a particular school, often with dedicated classes.

It CAN be done and done well, and some of the most inspiring, successful and honored advisers in the history of JEA (and many of them are advising RIGHT NOW) prove this daily. I thought I was a pretty decent adviser, though I never REALLY was able to fully grasp the Tao of Yearbook, despite advising 30 of them, and though I never found enough time or energy to REALLY do the very best I could do in, well, anything. I always had to compromise somewhere, and I only had to worry about newspaper and yearbook and various Language Arts classes. What a wimp!

Since 1975, the standards for being an "expert" student media adviser have expanded exponentially, and I now believe we are reaching some sort of tipping point, where advisers are overwhelmed and simply leaving teaching or advising, or are struggling to keep up on every trend and every opportunity, feeling increasingly stressed and stretched. Advising has always had a huge attrition rate, but it feels worse today.

I have started questioning whether the "new requirements" for college and professional journalists -- that they must be able to be "expert" at reporting, writing, podcasts, video, social media, web and print design, photography, and marketing/business -- are really going to produce better journalists. Maybe. Certainly, those who do the hiring would like to employ journalists who do it all, in expert fashion, for not much money.

Those publishers are not much different from school administrators looking for that one adviser who can do it all and do it well, are they?

I wonder if we have fallen into the trap of thinking that since a small percentage of our students will need ALL skills in order to land that plum gig with The Times (and I wonder if that is really true), that we as advisers must acquire/manage those skills as well.

Will some advisers, through their talent, drive, and energy, get it done? Yes, and you can meet most of them at national conventions.

But I have watched so many talented, passionate, and dedicated advisers leave our ranks over so many years. I'm not suggesting that we wave a white flag, essentially giving up the fight to provide the best education possible for our students (and, dare I say, for our country?).

I'm just wondering about our health. 

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