Our Achilles heels and our strengths: our students

Statue of Achilles dying (Dr. K/Creative Commons)

As I wrapped up my pre-institute work this evening, I was struck by so many of our comments focusing on what we pretend to know how to do but can't, or maybe don't even pretend to know how to do at all.

I am really fortunate to advise an award-winning publication. But the reason I wanted to participate in this experience is because there are a lot of things that my students do that I couldn't do myself, or at least not well.

Because my background is in writing, I feel very confident and comfortable helping my students in that area. But when it comes to InDesign for layout and Photoshop for photography, I can tell my students how things should look but fumble about if ever tasked with demonstrating it. I never feel like the expert I want to feel like, and I do my best to keep that from my students under the guise of the fact that it's a student-run publication and they should do it themselves!

It's important, of course, to empower students in the classroom. I'm sure many of you, like me, are even evaluated on running a classroom where students are largely in control of driving the learning. Classes shouldn't look like this anymore:

The beauty of the publication classroom is that by virtue of what we do, it never looks like that. But won't we all feel a little more confident if we can do better than simply sending our students off to figure things out?

I am looking forward to knowing more about Photoshop and InDesign. Those are my Achilles heels. Many of you have already shared yours. If not, why don't we put those out in the open this week and find ourselves next to those who can help us improve in areas where we can only fake knowledge? As long as we're willing to admit where we lack expertise, we're going to improve. And I can tell we're already off to a good start, as our pre-training certainly exposed us to a little bit of everything.

Keith Carlson
Naperville Central High School
Naperville, Ill.