At the beginning of the year, Journalism was probably my least anticipated class. After all, who wanted to read and write boring newspapers? But now, at the end of the year, I can easily say that Journalism was my most valuable class.
I enjoyed how we were made to go outside our personal comfort. For the stories that required interviews, before those, I had never gone out and questioned a complete stranger. It felt strange and awkward. However, those are valuable experiences, and I am glad that we were forced to do that.
To be honest, the presentations and such were quite boring, and it was hard for me to pay attention to them, but material like that is naturally boring, as it is basically just history but without the conflict. I don’t believe that there are many ways to make it interesting, but I still learned a good amount from the lectures.
I have quite mixed feelings about the current event quizzes. On one hand, at the beginning, I thought they were worthless and seemed like a waste of time to study for. However, as the year went on, as I kept reading Google News, I realized how much more aware I was of the news and what was actually going on. Before, I barely knew anything. The news became more interesting to me and I find myself going through Google News and reading many random articles, however insignificant one might seem. The quizzes seemed extremely difficult at first, but as I became more caught up with recent events and important people and places and upcoming events, the questions become increasingly easier. Even the ones you don’t know can be easily guessed if you have good knowledge of current events. I think the only thing I would change is to organize the questions a bit more. For example, tell the students to go on EXACTLY at 8 o clock or so on a few chosen days a week. Then, tell them to skim through the first 5 or 6 articles on every page, and test them on any of the materials. This way, the test is less luck-based and more fair to people who study more.
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