Judge not, lest ye be judged.
There’s often something that seems to be increasingly unfair. Whenever someone goes to a choir concert, band performance, or a theatre production, it’s understood that these are the work of students. You don’t compare those performances with those of professionals, who have spent their lives working on their craft. You realize that these are students who are constantly learning about their art, and as such, may not display the quality of high ended performances. We don’t compare the student cafeteria with a five star restaurant, we don’t compare the basketball and baseball teams with professionals, and we don’t expect students in the medical field to perform surgery.
So why then is the student run newspaper critiqued so fiercely? The Independent is a student learning project and collaboration that gives students an introduction into the field of journalism. You can’t expect every story you read or they write to be Pulitzer worthy. These are students learning how to write, student who are using the college paper to find out what works and what doesn’t work in their writing. Trial and Error.
Despite this, the student newspaper is constantly berated with people pointing out our faults and laughing at our mistakes. They hold the work of students to unfair standards with high-minded superiority, with so rarely offering constructive criticism.
Think for a minute, if you would like your English 102 paper critiqued publicly on a weekly basis. How many students would join the theatre productions if they knew their audience would judge them so harshly? How many people would sing, or play their instrument, or compete if they thought that their every mistake would be highlighted, and their success would be buried.
The point of student participating in programs at Clark, a community college, is so that we can try out different things before devoting the rest of our college life on it. We constantly learn new things about how our field works and what we can do to make it better. Given the response I’ve heard from friends, peers, and even teachers, I’ve come to expect that if I want to continue in this field, I should get comfortable with being ridiculed and critiqued on a daily basis. I should come to love the sneer and disdain that even my friends have for my field. I should, in all probability, find something else that’s not so universally reviled. The faculty and student body actively alienates a group of students who are still learning. So much for the ‘next step’.
