This school year, I'm one of the school paper adviser for the the Young Louisian Courier. I had to learn (the hard way) how a newspaper is put together. Unfortunately, the other adviser wasn't much of a help, though she's been an adviser for a number of years already. I've had to deal with facilitating the club meetings, collecting and correcting pupils' works and output, as well as layouting the actual paper. I had to learn, together with the kids the basics of writing news articles, features, sports articles, editorial and editorial cartoon (versus regualr cartoon), copy reading and layouting . All the technical stuff made my eyes water in front of the computer while layouting, example,all headlines must have verbs, headlines in English must have a verb in the present tense, Filipino headlines must be in the past tense, captions of pictures must have a title first before its description, Science and Health is usually not included in the competition proper but must be present in the paper. Did they teach all these in school? I must not have been paying attention. Layouting was probaby the most difficult stage since this is a first for me. After revising and re-reading the acrticles for the nth time, I finally gave the final copy to the printers for printing just this afternoon. I also had to RUSH the printers since we're supposed to send ten copies to the Dep Ed Division Office on Monday as our passport for the Division Press Con on the 9th. The work does not end there! I still have to devise a (hopefully) effective system for the cliniquing with the writers before the competition date. It's also one of my observations that our kids need to exert much effort to be creative in writing. They're not that interested in reading books for pleasure anymore, puro school works lang. Hay. Kawawa sila.
So, my hell month is coming to an end. Kaya may time na mag-blog ulit. Time to focus on the second issue of our school paper!
