Truth or Dare
"I always knew I'd teach when I got too old and ugly to be on TV," is how Amy Atkins joked about her decision to go into teaching to the Communicator, the magazine of the Radio-Television News Directors Association.Looking for inspiration, I checked out Mike Cavender's article, "From Classroom to Newsroom," in the February issue. True, I did get some rah-rahs for journalists-who-would-be-professors. Like the thrill ex-newsjocks get from working with people who can still be molded and shaped. But Cavender expounds on many of the pitfalls:
--The rat race to achieve tenure track.
--Pay so low that he urges you to think about a second job.
--Open hostility between the haves -- those who flaunt PhDs or master's degrees -- and the have-nots -- those who enter academia via the newsroom.
We'll see.
--Posted by Jon, the rookie professor, about to sell my house.
posted by Jon and/or Kamilah @ 12:39 PM
1 Comments:
Congrats and good luck to you, Jon, as you enter a new stage of your career as a rookie professor. It’s important work that will affect thousands of students in the coming years, in ways you may not know.
In your recent e-mail, you asked me: “What was the most important lesson you learned in journalism school?” Oddly enough, the most valuable lesson I picked up had little to do with the practice of journalism -- and everything to do with life.
As a blue-collar kid from South-Central L.A., my folks wanted me to work right out of high school. I was only in journalism school at the urging of a late uncle -- an educator and a graduate-school dean at another college. He saw my potential, and he didn’t want me to pump gas or flip burgers for the rest of my life.
I was intimidated by college, by my courses and professors, by students from the suburbs. Not the Asian whiz kid stereotype, I didn’t do well at first. History and philosophy bored me. Political science and economics befuddled me. Pre-med classes? Forget about it. I studied diligently, but barely made passing grades. Discouraged, I considered dropping out after my freshman year.
Then I took a feature-writing class taught by Dixon Gayer, a retired journalism professor from Cal State Long Beach and a former disc jockey and celebrity publicist. The man clearly loved his work, and it amazed me that an accomplished, gray-haired professor also enjoyed the only school task I seemed to be half-good at – writing.
While other professors seemed bored, Dixon Gayer was alive. While other professors barely cared, he offered encouragement. While other professors scribbled C’s, D’s and F’s on my papers, he gave me C-pluses – and urged me to keep trying. Sometimes he gave students cassette tapes with constructive comments on our work, and some of those words have stuck with me to today. Eddie, he said, I think you have a special talent. I believe you have a future in journalism.
Another point, for those of us who still believe that the issues of race and class pervade our society, despite mass psychological denial by some: Dixon Gayer was the first white authority figure in my life to see past my skin color, to give me respect, as a person. With that small gesture, he helped to open humanity to a young kid from the 'hood.
So, 25 years after j-school, I remember Dixon Gayer. I remember that he cared about his students, and in the process, taught at least one of them about life.
- Ed Iwata, business writer, USA Today
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