Thank You, Newspaper

Lately, a lot of conversations/events have been reminding me of my position as Editor for the school newspaper and how it has affected my life, and how it will affect my life in the future. Ms. Serensky paralleled Vernon and I today, commenting on the fact that I may be in the same position as him someday. I agreed, although added that I believe I would make better choices than him. I'd like to think I wouldn't publish silly, private photos of someone for petty reasons, but I can't be sure. Despite the fact that I am an Editor, would I feel differently if I were the Editor of a non-funded newspaper? Also, I have never received blackmail against someone I dislike. Would I publish something if it could ruin their lives? I have been pushed around before, and it would probably feel pretty good to be the one in control, like Vernon is now.

I'll probably never know, since I may never be in the same situation, but I still believe I would do the right thing. As a kind individual pointed out to me today, I'm a very empathetic person, which is an admirable quality for a leader to have. This surprised me, since I didn't realize that it was such a recognizable trait in my personality. Either that, or (s)he is just being way too nice.

There's a noteworthy accomplishment that I'd like to touch on in this blog post though.

The last thing I'd want to do is embarrass someone by mentioning their name, so I will simply call this person Awesome. Why Awesome? Well, I like the word, but that's beside the point.

Awesome was having trouble with their poetry papers, and I noticed after taking a glance at their grade. I immediately noticed some of the errors, because the majority of their problems were just grammatical/mechanical. I fix errors like those every day in newspaper, so why not come to their aid? I asked if they would like some help, they did, I took the paper, revised it, then gave it back the next day. During their next poetry paper, Awesome had it next to them as they wrote, or at least that's what Awesome told me. Awesome got their latest poetry paper back and improved immensely.

Seriously, that was one of the proudest moments of my life. You can call me egotistical, you can call me a bragger, but I'm honestly not trying to be any of those. I'm just amazed by the fact that I was able to help someone else through my writing skills. I mean...I do it in newspaper, but in AP English? I never thought that would be possible.

Maybe if we all just helped each other to improve, we'd all be getting A's on these papers. I'm just throwing that out there. Food for thought.

(Also, I feel as though that whole last half completely negates my feelings of "Oh, maybe I'm not that empathetic." I know I'm empathetic, I guess I just didn't realize it was noticeable when I'm not doing empathetic-type things. Well, whatever, I digress.)

(Magicka Page Count: 3 STILL. Very busy week, but unproductive to my writing.)