All the News That Gave Me Fits to Print

The first edition of our school newspaper went out yesterday to the hungry masses and was--if I may so without a hint of conceit but, admittedly, a healthy dose of pride--a smashing success.

The process was long and arduous. Two other teachers (Mar and Michelle) and myself convened the Journalism Club about 5 weeks ago. We had a story brainstorming session, assigned the stories, met with the kids once or twice a week to get their drafts polished up as much as possible, and figured out our newspaper name (GarfieldSpace is a play on MySpace, a wildly popular online community; I tried to make the GarfieldSpace logo look as much like the MySpace logo as possible). Mar and Michelle typed everything up and I learned how to use Adobe InDesign for the layout which took a seemingly endless 12 hours to do. Thursday after school we gave out 100 teaser copies (the Journalism Club members in front of the school, yelling, "Extra! Extra! Read all about it!") and Thursday night I made 700 copies - that's 3,500 sheets (7 reams) of paper. I had to staple all 700 copies by hand because a few years ago when the budget cuts hit us hard, we stopped buying staples for the copy machines and we've never had staples since. 700 staples, by the way, requires emptying a full stapler, refilling, emptying it again, refilling, emptying it again, and refilling. And some people say schools don't need more money...

The aim of the paper is to promote student voice, to give students a forum to discuss issues they find to be important, and to foster community at our school.

I have never seen my kids read so intently and so void of distraction for such an extended period of time. They even read so carefully that they found a few mistakes (they took no small delight in saying, "Mr. Evans, you messed up!" since I'm always getting on their case about making fewer mistakes).

Wanna see/read it? You can try clicking here or, if your browser is lame and doesn't know what to do with it, you can download the file from the directory index by right clicking it if you're on a PC or control-clicking it if you're on a Mac and choosing the option to download the file directly to your hard drive. Your computer probably already has a PDF viewer, such as the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you can't figure out how to view it, let me know.