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My Thoughts |
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| Important: the views expressed in the following pages are not necessarily, and sometimes most certainly not, mine! This bit here is, though. | ||||
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This is written roughly a year after 'the Paper' was
published. I had changed the title that the previous two editions had
carried, which was 'the Verve'. My problem with that was, well, I thought
the Verve sucked bad...and it seemed a bad omen to have a product on your
hands named after a terrible litigation disaster. That's like calling your
boat the Titanic, or a field trip Apollo 13. (I had toyed
with "the Cure"...and thought of campaigning such: "Sick of Glossy
Magazines written by thirty-year-olds telling you how you should live your
life? Then get the Cure.") Just looking at the flimsy, stapled pages makes me very, very angry. I had enjoyed making it so much. Talking people into writing articles, all my ideas (Which, may I say, were right on track. In the next few months, several teenage girl magazines published articles incredibly similar to those that had appeared in the Paper. As you can imagine, that made me very excited...), extensive, heavy editing, formatting, layout. Meeting deadlines. It was all going famously well, and apart from a severe aching headache, I couldn't have been happier. And then a particular English teacher (not my own, and not head of the subject) intervened. I had told her that I wanted to edit the student paper at the beginning of the term, and asked what I should do, organise etc. She was no help at all and did nothing, so I just went ahead with my plans. I had also talked to the previous editor, who said that she had only gone through the Headmistress when having the drafts approved. So that's what I did. Imagine my surprise then, while at a school computer doing final adjustments, having left my draft with the Head, the aforementioned English teacher came up behind me. She screamed in front of everyone that I was rude and underhand and going behind her back. She said that what I was doing was completely wrong. I tried to say that I HAD told her all about it before. She said that wasn't good enough, that she had to be a main part of all processes. Then she verbally abused me some more. I then had to go all over the school, getting her another copy, apologising to the Head...and this was only a few hours before the print run. My stress factor was severe. In the end, after she had looked at it, I barely had to change anything except the word "crap" which appeared frequently in the "Your Say" section. The Paper, by her verdict, was 'okay, for a first issue'. 110 copies were run off, and sold for $1 each. By the end of lunchtime, we were out of stock. Some of the contributors were not even able to get a copy, and I myself have only one. It had been a pleasant, mild success. My mental peace and self-esteem, however, was completely torn to shreds. I was exhausted, upset, angry, humiliated...and who knows what else. This teacher had taken all my work, which could only have benefited the school co-curricular, and made it redundant. It no longer held any personal worth, and thinking about it just makes me hurt all over again. Yet another lovely story about the inability of schools, in particular, teachers to deal with 'alternatively gifted' students. I have been asked not infrequently when the next issue is going to come out. I tried to come to terms with my problems, and even set up a meeting with interested contributors (presided over briefly by her) to discuss the future of the Paper. Nothing awful happened, but I realised I was too demotivated and unhappy to pull it off. Thus ended my career as student paper editor. |
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