On Being a Teacher

(Excerpt from a talk to the 2007 graduates of the Bay Area Multicultural Media Academy, San Francisco.)

I told a friend that I was teaching a class of high school students this summer.

            She said:  “Don’t they make you feel old?”

I had to stop for a minute to think. This is what I thought:

When I wrote my first news story more than 25 years ago, our BAMMA editor in chief Jesse Garnier was still a little boy.

     When I got my first newspaper job, our wonderful student editors, Walter, Donna, Zoneil, were not yet born.

 When I taught my first newswriting class, our director Cristina Azocar, now a nationally known diversity educator, was a fresh-faced college kid.

 And now you come—15, 16, 17 years old --  a different generation inhabiting a  world far different than any of us could have imagined, with technology that has changed at a faster rate in the last 10 years than it did in centuries and millennia before, going back to the time of humankind’s invention of the wheel.

Welcome to a rich and lofty heritage. We are handing you – hope we have given you these last two weeks – the core values that have defined journalism forever, and will continue to, no matter what technology brings:

            Fairness, accuracy, integrity, context, a heart for deep local reporting on communities of diverse color and class; a hand for always reaching to bridge what my mentor Bob Maynard called the “fault lines” of  race, class, gender, geography, generation and ideology.

 Do you make me feel old?

 No.

 When you’re a teacher, and you see your students, no matter which generation,  produce something of quality, create something of beauty (and creating is, I believe, the reason we were put here on this earth) – when I see one of you create,  a little bit of me somehow gets to live on forever.

And that is pretty cool.