Southern style
I returned to my volunteer gig with Childrens PressLine yesterday for my last workshop of the spring session. We had 30 kids — way more from our pre-spring break seven! We had kids from age 8 to 17, so we could run the workshop the way it was designed, with older kids acting as editors and younger kids being reporters.
We split them into reporting teams. Each was given a “story” identified from previous weeks with the ideas and questions brainstormed from before. They practiced interviewing using voice recorders. When they actually do stories, the information will be taken from the reporter’s synthesis of the story and the interviews recorded.
It was incredible to see several weeks of inching forward result in such bounds — the smallest yet largest reward of teaching. And it’s always a joy to see an 8-year-old really read the newspaper, turn the pages with his little hands and watch his forehead scrunch up when he reads something interesting.
They’re tackling tough issues: school reform, youth violence, rebuilding the city’s parks, planning what the city will look like in the future. One question for the last topic asked, “What do you think needs the most improvement?” and one nine year old answered, “The houses and schools and roads and buildings. Everything. I think everything got worse after Katrina. New Orleans was like this before, but it wasn’t this bad.”
Next week they’ll go to the zoo and actually interview kids for their stories. I wish I could be there, but I’ll be graduating. Hopefully these kids will hang on for the summer session and get to write some stories for the newspaper.
