A school media adviser will always be in an awkward position, being both a student advocate and an employee of the school district, possibly a parent and often a community member, but also someone whose role may be to help young people critique adults.
And that doesn't include the many additional roles, beyond classroom teacher or even media adviser, that occur when adults and students spend many hours somewhat informally together, working toward a common cause.
A lot of personal counseling goes on during those after-school sessions working on completing a deadline. There's music and food and goofiness and the occasional tears or anger.
There is a reason coaches and advisers and directors often develop stronger relationships with their students than, say, a math teacher who just teaches. One reason is that they are engaged in some sort of performance that will be public... not the sort of thing that we think of as connected to math class.
The adviser is in charge but is not the editor. We call it "student media" for a reason. If an adviser wants to become a journalist, that is certainly an available option (though that choice carries its own risks and a likely pay cut). Problems occur when advisers begin imagining themselves as journalists and forget that they are teachers first.
This is not much different from the situations theater directors and athletic coaches find themselves in. Much of their work with students occurs during concentrated periods of time, prepping for a game or a show.
In most cases, theater directors do not perform with their students. Athletic coaches never perform with their athletes. It is possible that the directors and coaches might be able to perform better than their young charges, but that is not the agreed upon relationship.
It would not be surprising to find that a media adviser might be the strongest reporter, writer, page designer, video editor, proofreader, etc., in the media lab. It would also not be surprising to find that a freshman English teacher has a much stronger grasp of the "light and dark" imagery in "Romeo and Juliet," as an example.
What would be surprising in that case would be the teacher writing the "perfect" essay that all students should aspire to though none could rival, and then sharing that at the end of the unit. "Look at how much less you know than I!"
Occasionally in my early years advising I would become exasperated with some students not making themselves available for certain reporting that I deemed essential. For instance, the yearbook needed photos from Prom but most students were more interested in actually living their big night than acting as a reporter. So I might spend a few hours shooting photos. After all, what kind of yearbook would my students be creating if we didn't provide much coverage of a big event?
It took me some years to come to grips with what athletic coaches and musical directors know instinctively: if I, the adviser, cared more about complete coverage and excellence than my students, something had gone wrong. The book wasn't a student yearbook anymore, but something else... something at least partially "owned" by me.
Of course, it's impossible for coaches, directors, advisers or teachers to disconnect our emotions from the performances of our students. There is a pride that comes from helping young people produce something beyond what they thought they could do, and that pride has little to do with "wins" or awards.
Occasionally, some excited football coach will leap off the sideline and make a tackle or otherwise get involved in the game. They even had to create a rule to cover this after a coach tackled a guy returning a kick-off, the runner having evaded the tacklers only to be blindsided. The TD is awarded anyway and the coach kicked out of the game, if you are interested.
There is no such rule for media advisers. There are lots of ways they can complete some tasks necessary to publish, and most of those will be invisible to the public or to administrators.
But the students always know.
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