Heels over head

Oct. 7, 2010

Dear Leslie,

The last of the season's crop of tomatoes remain in the garden. The cucumbers, beets, carrots and lettuce struggled this year, but we couldn't eat all the tomatoes. I know someone who serves Bloody Marys made with fresh tomatoes from her garden. Fresh and real are impossible to simulate.

The temperature falls into the 30s at night. DC spends many of them at her potter's wheel in the basement, already making Christmas gifts. The last of the Stieg Larsson books has my attention. I hardly ever read fiction but wanted to see why they're so popular. He knows how to tell a story.

The days sparkle and climb into the 70s, days meant for long walks on a golf course. Some of my days are like that. Some are spent under the fluorescent suns in the Grauel Building at school, teaching college students about feature writing and advising the staff at the campus newspaper.

I knew H.O. Grauel, the English professor the building is named for. He lived across the street from me on Bellevue. He was as fine and refined a person as I've known. He once took the time to gently point out a mistake I'd made on the sports page. I'd said a football player somersaulting through the air in the photograph was flying head over heels. Actually, Dr. Grauel pointed out, in the photograph the player's heels were over his head. He would have made a fine copy editor.

A college newspaper adviser has a quirky job. In one way it's like being a newspaper publisher, requisitioning money from the university to have the newspaper printed and approving the hours the staffers work. But the primary responsibility is overseeing the journalism produced at the newspaper.

My primary responsibility, I have discovered, is to be around. To be there when questions arise, and they do all the time. To question stories that are incomplete or headlines that don't make sense. But college journalism students make mistakes just as math students and business students do. When journalism students make mistakes they appear in print for thousands of people to see.

That's the way journalism works. I don't know anything about educational theories, but I do know my best students are those who aren't afraid to make mistakes.

I showed my class a YouTube video of college TV broadcasts that went awry. One from Syracuse University turned into an on-air fiasco after one of the student broadcasters giggled while reading a report about a marijuana bust. For the rest of the broadcast, whether it was the weather report or a story about a house fire, the students couldn't stop themselves from laughing.

Everyone knows the helpless feeling of being unable to stop laughing. The adviser probably should have pulled the plug at some point, but my point to my students was that college is a place where mistakes are allowed. A place to learn how to speak up, speak out and let their true selves be seen.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.