As it is almost time for us senior to end our final school year, and take our steps towards building our career, I wanted to take my time and honor one of the best classes at Glendale High School: Journalism.
I always thought that Journalism was a class that I would enjoy. Since I loved writing for the most part, I always wanted to have a class where I could pursue my writing skills. Being mixed up with classes, and not knowing that I could choose my classes during my freshman year, I lost my opportunity to start taking this class from my first year of high school. I started in Journalism during my sophomore year, and then I continued afterwards until my final year of high school.
When I changed schools, I thought that it would be the end of my time in Journalism and there would not be another class at my new school. Luckily, when I moved to GHS, I talked to my counselor, who did his best to include me in all of the classes that I wanted to take, and I was so excited to continue my Journalism journey.
As soon as I started taking Journalism at our school, I started to get better at writing articles and making my thoughts clearer by putting them down on paper. This class actually taught me a lot, not only educationally, but also through abilities that I will use later in life. I was able to professionally hone my skills by constantly doing interviews, talking to different people and making sure to be a great listener and note-taker.
Being involved in this class was definitely to my advantage, because I got a lot of hands-on experiences in news-writing, which will be very useful for a lot of us who are interested in becoming journalists in the future or maybe having Journalism as our college major.
Taking Journalism as a class might not mean a lot to some people, but once you start to understand the important aspects of the class, you get to fully embrace the idea of what it is like to be a professionally-trained adult. You are required to encourage people to talk to you and share their honest opinions, which is a skill that we will all be able to use later on in life.
For myself, Journalism taught me a lot through simply interviewing people. In doing so, I vastly improved my communication skills. I think that’s the reason that I was so successful in this class, and I also credit my teacher, Mr. Livingston, for giving me these opportunities.
I always took an active role in the process of writing each of my articles, which helped me to better engage with people, depending on the type of piece I was working on. All of the interviews were the most enjoyable part of it all for me.
This class also provided a very calm environment for me, which made me feel more open to expressing my thoughts. I was able to really think about and understand what I was writing about, and I was also able to express myself more clearly for other people reading my articles.
But I think the most valuable aspect of Journalism is what we end up with after finishing our assignment. After all of the time that I have put into each of my articles, I end up with the best version of it, with the help of the editors on the Journalism staff, and of course, our teacher.
It is honestly such a pleasure to work in such a professional environment here, which is also very educational and more organized than other classes on our campus. We each have our deadlines to meet and the specific ways that we submit our articles. Having a clear system in place is another thing that I enjoyed about Journalism since I, myself, am very organized.
After we’re done with our articles and they are ready to be published, they all go up at GHSExplosion.com, where each of our staff members has their own page. By just clicking on their name, you can view all of the articles written by them from previous years. The most fascinating thing about all of this is that these articles will be stored there forever.
Besides featuring our articles, the website also allows you to take polls and follow our sports scores. It is very comforting to know that all of my work will stay posted on a website, because it also allows me to easily share my articles, or my friends’ articles, with other classmates and friends.
Overall, this class has given me a lot of knowledge about Journalism, from the right way to start an article, to the correct way to end one. As I mentioned before, it taught me a lot about writing, but it will also help me later in my professional life, and I love that about this class.
My biggest takeaway from all these years in Journalism is that I learned to enjoy writing, which might be the entrance to the newest stage in my life. I would recommend all GHS students to try taking Journalism at some point in their high school career, because they will enjoy it a lot and learn a lot from it as well.
