Category Archives: Education

Six ways to stay (or get) sharp

One of my basic rules of being a good copy editor (other than all that grammar Nazi stuff) is to know a little about a lot. Yeah, most of us on non-universal desks specialize in some way, either in news, sports, arts, business or features, but it’s always a good idea to be familiar with a variety of topics. It’s hard to edit stories with authority if you don’t have a good grasp of basic current events and trivia.

Know what the top-grossing film of all time is, considering inflation? (It’s “Gone With the Wind.”) What about who won the 1976 World Series? (The Reds swept the Yankees.)  Who on earth is the President of the European Council? (Herman van Rompuy.)

“But Kels,” you say, “how does one learn all of this and become more well-read?”

Here are six ways to increase your general knowledge that don’t involve eating an encyclopedia.

1. Watch “Jeopardy.”

My grandmother is not college-educated. She only recently got a passport (she’s going with us to London next month). She’s still using dial-up Internet. But she knows a freakish amount of cultural minutiae. How? “Jeopardy.”

“Jeopardy” is on pretty much every week day, and its rotating categories ensure that you’ll never get bored. You can also watch the Kid, Teen and College versions of “Jeopardy” and goggle at how some nerdy 12-year-old knows more than you do.

2. Visit Sporcle.

Apart from being perhaps the greatest time-waster since Minesweeper, Sporcle offers a lot of knowledge disguised cleverly as quizzes. If it exists, there’s a Sporcle quiz on it. Countries’ exports, beer consumption, movie quotes, European monarchs, Hogwarts staff, all-time leading NBA scorers. You may feel like an idiot if you can name only 10 Danish monarchs (the ones named Christian, yeah!), but surrendering and clicking the “I Give Up” button is perhaps the greatest lesson of all.

2. Set up Google Reader and use it.

I subscribe to a few dozen sites and blogs through Google Reader. Most of them are tech- or journalism-related, but a few are for business, politics, travel, cooking, entertainment and other areas. Whenever you find a blog or site you like, link it to your Google Reader. You don’t even have to read every blog entry that comes in; skim and see what’s interesting. You’ll be amazed at what you learn. You can also supplement a Google Reader blogroll with a Twitter feed; follow your favorite bloggers, writers and personalities on Twitter. If you follow only your in-person friends on Twitter, you’re missing out.

4. Consume foreign media.

Because domestic (domestic meaning whatever country you live in, not necessarily just American) media inherently only offers a limited or even biased viewpoint, it’s imperative that you look at news sources outside your border. It may be the anglophile in me talking, but pound-for-pound (no pun intended), it doesn’t get any better than the BBC in terms of global, even-handed reporting on all levels. I also like Der Spiegel.

As a bonus, pick a news source from a country whose language you’re studying. Not only will you get news from another perspective, but you’ll also practice your foreign-language skills.

5. Travel smart.

The only museum in the bum-you-know-what town you’re driving through celebrates a mutant ear of corn. See it anyway. That historical society down the road? Pay it a visit. The brass plate on the downtown bank says someone was shot there 125 years ago trying to rob it. Cool, look him up (or her; I pass no judgment).

Some museums and historical sites are more glamorous than others (many of which can be seen in the photos of yours truly), but all can be valuable if you’re open-minded. No museum is too small, too cheesy or too weird that it can’t be enjoyed.

6. Play in pub quizzes

These are more popular in the UK than in America (in my experience, anyway), but a lot of bars and restaurants are doing them now. The concept is simple: Go out with a group of friends, participate in a trivia contest, have a few drinks and eat. If you win, you get money, drinks or some other prize. If you lose, you still had fun, and you got to learn some new stuff. Win-win.

So there you have it. Six fun, relatively pain-free ways to expand your general knowledge and help you be a better copy editor and a better citizen of humanity in general. Happy learning, kids.

An update

Quite a bit has happened since my last post!

I’m a little more than halfway through my editing internship with The Kansas City Star’s sports desk. I’m enjoying it a lot, and it’s really helping me to hone my (dormant) design skills. It’s fun trying to outsmart the dastardly CCI program, which I think is a Trojan horse engineered by Denmark to topple the American economic system. I also bring cupcakes from time to time, which has endeared me to the local population.

My visa application is at the British consulate in the amazing city of Chicago, and I’m getting ready to register at Kent. The school’s been very helpful with everything and I can’t wait to get there. There are a lot of activities and societies that I’m interested in, I have a part-time job I’m going to apply for (teaching international relations to A Level students) and I find out where I’m living in amazing Woolf College in a couple of weeks. It’s crazy how much there is to do to get ready — student ID registration, enrollment, NHS registration, doctors’ appointments, train and plane schedules, grocery stores, etc. The logistics of it all are pretty daunting.

I did have a small tragedy this week. I had decided, a few weeks ago, that rather than get an entirely new laptop, I’d patch up the one I have and hold onto it for another year. Sadly, during its maintenance, the motherboard freaked out and my beloved PowerBook G4 has gone up to the big coffee shop in the sky. So this Sunday I’m going with my mother to the Apple store on the Plaza to pick out a new one. Rather than get a lower-end one that will be “good enough,” I’m biting the bullet and getting what I would have gotten if I’d just gone ahead and bought a new one to begin with (ironic, eh?). Basically, a 15.4″ MacBook Pro with a 320GB hard drive and a 2.4GHz processor. Oh, and a 32GB iPod Touch because of the college promotion. It’s also a tax holiday in Missouri this weekend. I’d be stupid not to get one.

So that’s about where I am now. I’m hoping to turn this more into a commentary and less of a play-by-play once the school year starts, but right now I’m mostly working and planning, planning and working.

An update on school

Barring a catastrophe (or government bureaucracy), I’ll be heading back to England in about two and a half months. It seems unreal how fast this year went by.

After a somewhat slow spring in terms of updates and news, I finally received solid information on my loans a few days ago. I’m thankful that the bank-managed Stafford loans were replaced with government-managed loans. The interest rates are lower and my school can take a more proactive approach instead of waiting for a bank to get back to them.

I ticked down the checklist — completing the FAFSA, filling out a promissory note, completing online loan counseling and sending Kent the updates — and now I wait, with a lot of pressure off my shoulders. I’m hoping I have solid acceptance information in a few weeks, so I can arrange for my airfare, my housing (yay Woolf College!) and my visa.

Until I get my news, I’m trying to be productive. I started a list of stuff to take with me, I’ve been researching Canterbury and what to do there, I’ve picked out a new bed set and I’m starting a sports editing internship with The Kansas City Star. My job starts Monday, June 28, and barely a week and a half after it ends, I leave. Very heady. I don’t think it will really set in until I get my visa stamp, and maybe not even until I get on the plane.

The digital copy desk

When I saw the new Ask the Recruiter post this morning, about making yourself more valuable as a copy editor, I had a hunch that the skills in question didn’t necessarily have anything to do with editing.

I was right, more or less.

The three main skills mentioned all have to do with Web content: search-engine optimization (SEO), tagging and analytics.

SEO is a skill that most copy editors possess even if they might not know it. Whenever you write a Web headline and are thinking of words that will make the story pop up in a search engine, you’re practicing SEO. Tagging is similar, although it’s more of a behind-the-curtain thing. And analytics basically breaks down your site traffic to determine what days, posts, pages and so on drew the most traffic.

The post reminded me of the shift in copy-editor education and workload during my last semester at the Kansan. For several semesters before, uploading Web content had been the domain of a nightly Web producer. Having done it myself, I can say that it was a pretty thankless job. Also, I kind of had to sit in the corner of the newsroom when I did it, something that kind of stung…

During my second semester as managing editor, we took a new tack and upgraded the Web producers’ jobs to more multimedia-based work, “hiring” students in the online reporting class. The job of uploading nightly Web content fell to the copy desk, which I’d worked on the previous semester.

Before the semester began, I typed up a (ridiculously minute) step-by-step guide for every copy editor. It was basically a crash course in Ellington, our CMS. I tried to think of every pop-up error and red flag that had ever plagued me, and gave troubleshooting instructions on how to fix it. How to set the time stamp? In there. Correcting a rogue ampersand? Done. Priority levels? Check.

The biggest issue was selling the idea to the copy editors. Why should they have to do this when someone else had always done it before? Cue my spiel about online priorities, well-written Web heads, the need to be flexible, the need to think beyond the print medium and, most importantly, the fact that they were going to do it as part of their grade.

After almost three straight weeks in the newsroom every night training the copy desk, I finally trusted them to help each other and fly solo. By the end of the semester, most of them had it down cold, several of them told me they preferred Web uploading to their actual editing duties and the midnight, panicky phone calls had stopped.

While I’m sure most of them saw the work as tedious (occasionally), difficult (when the system was pissy), beneath them (not really) or boring (guilty), they all left their editing class with something to add to their CVs: They had experience using a CMS, knew basic HTML and could write a Web head that would land on the top of a Google search. And I daresay those things will come in handy during their job searches, more so than even their (gasp!) print-based editing.

My dad, me and World War II

Last week, the History Channel had a five-night, 10-hour series, “WWII in HD.” My dad and I watched it together, as part of a bonding experience between the two of us and as fellow history nerds.

The series, if you haven’t seen it, is a must-see. Gary Sinise does the bulk of the narration, with 12 actors narrating for individuals whose stories have been singled out. The footage is mostly full-color, digitally restored for the presentation. The series also uses maps to illustrate the action, and interviews with some of the 12 featured individuals (those who are still alive). The people are fairly diverse — an Austrian Jew fighting for the U.S., a Tuskegee airman, a nurse, a Japanese-American who became a POW, a fighter pilot and a collection of Marines, Army recruits and naval soldiers.

My dad and I discussed the action and the tactics. A portion of my political science coursework in school was in the areas of military strategy and ethics, which allowed me to critically analyze and understand what was happening.

My dad said something to me during one of the programs that stuck with me.

“I’m proud of you for taking an interest in this. Most girls your age don’t care about this, or most guys, for that matter.”

That really made me think, about how there are people my age who don’t know what the Holocaust was, or Iwo Jima, or D-Day. I’m sure they’d be shocked and appalled to know that the American government herded American citizens of Japanese ancestry into internment camps while fighting to free Jews, Gypsies, POWs and other political prisoners from the Nazis.

It’s also a bitter pill to swallow knowing that war-based video games are so popular (including among many of my friends), while the young people who play them are oblivious to war’s actual cost and the staggering amount of logistical detail necessary to win one. It’s also eye-opening to see outrage at a dozen or so American deaths in Afghanistan each month, when the casualty toll on any given island in the Pacific could be in the thousands. That’s not meant in any way to diminish the losses sustained in Afghanistan and Iraq, but it does make me wonder if we’d have the iron will necessary to win WWII if it were fought again tomorrow. Of course there are differences in perceived legitimacy, goals and politics between those conflicts, but I don’t think Americans today would tolerate thousands of deaths in a two-week span, no matter how strong support for the engagement was.

I got emotionally invested in the series. When the sad fate of a few of the featured individuals was revealed — John Doe was killed in action — it actually hurt. I think this series would do great things when it came to teaching WWII in schools.

Studying war and military strategy as I have, I try my hardest not to glorify war, glamorize it or elevate it to some noble standard. I do believe in St. Augustine’s theory that there is such a thing as a Just War, and that WWII would be one such conflict. But seeing the death, tension, fear and misery in that old yet surprisingly crisp footage makes me think that, yes, war is hell, and it’s a hell people need to be aware of, lest they send men and women to their deaths too easily.

Foreign languages, je t’aime

When I discussed deferring grad school with my parents, one of my mother’s conditions was that I do something worthwhile in my time off. A couple of days ago, I enrolled in French at the local community college for the spring semester.

My foreign language, for the purpose of formal education in high school and college, is German. My mother’s family is German, so the language has always had cultural significance for me. I haven’t had the chance to use my German in quite a while, but I’m confident that if I spent any significant amount of time in Germany, I could get back up to snuff and maybe eventually become fluent.

But now, especially because I’m focusing so much on the European Union at school next year, I think that I should probably be at least somewhat familiar with all three primary EU languages.

My earlier experience with French is limited to about a week and a half spent in Paris, Nice and Monaco. I got the absolute basics down (hello, good-bye, excuse me, please and thank you) and knew well enough how to order food (except for that one time when I ordered fish when I meant chicken).

I think it’s important for people to learn multiple languages. I definitely plan on bilingual (or even trilingual) early education for my own children when I have them. I also think my European cousins have it a little easier, getting so much access to foreign languages and more emphasis on them in school. It’s gotta a lot easier to practice German or French or Italian when you’re a train ride away from Berlin, Paris and Rome.

So this spring, whilst patiently waiting for September, I’ll start studying my third language. I hope it’ll be fun and come in handy next time I’m in Paris.

For Real This Time

Today was a nasty, cold, rainy, icky day. I didn’t even leave the house. Luckily, a ray of sunshine came through and brightened my day.

A nice flat envelope with the Airmail stamp on it arrived. Inside were my papers from the University of Kent — my deferred acceptance letter, a packet of housing information and a letter I need to sign confirming my place. It was an amazing relief, like coming home to find your chair has been kept warm.

As soon as I send a copy of my passport photo page, my transcripts and degree confirmations from the University of Kansas and my signed letter of intent, I can start working on all those other little details. Getting a FAFSA filed early next year, getting loan paperwork done, applying for housing.

My home next year will be Woolf College, a grad students-only complex. I’ll snag a large bedroom with my own bathrom and share a macked-out communal kitchen. After communal (and I mean communal) bathrooms in Reading, it’ll be nice to have my own loo. I’ll be just up the road from the town centre, which my research and Google-map surveillance shows has necessary amenities such as Boots, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and an Odeon cinema. I’ll figure out the bus routes and become friendly with Canterbury West rail station. I have new bed linens picked out and an eye on a student rail pass.

I have my classes more or less picked out. I’ll have six over the year: European Union policy, human rights policy, international security, political economy, research methods and an international relations survey course. I’ve even scouted all of my books on Amazon — I can get EVERY book for EVERY class for the cost of what the books for ONE class would cost at a first-run bookstore. Yeah, I’m good.

So, after a couple of months of feeling a little blue over my decision to defer, I now feel excited, refreshed and optimistic.

I set up a countdown Widget in Dashboard today. 320 days until Sept. 14, 2010, the day my parents, grandmother and I leave for London on a family holiday and to get me settled. I’ll get settled in Canterbury (about an hour and a half southeast of London by train) on Sept. 19, and Freshers Week and orientation starts Sept. 20. Sept. 27 is my first day of classes, and graduation is in July at Canterbury Cathedral.

Let’s roll.

The “Race Beat”

Two weeks ago, I visited Little Rock, Ark., with my parents. The day after visiting Bill Clinton’s presidential library, we drove to a more suburban part of the city to see Little Rock Central High School and the accompanying little museum.

Little Rock Central High School.

Little Rock Central High School.

After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, integration began in the nation’s schools. In 1957, nine African-American students attempted to attend Central High. Protests, threats and harassment were rampant, and Gov. Orval Faubus attempted to keep the students from the school. In the end, President Eisenhower had to call in the 101st Airborne to protect the students, while federalizing the state’s National Guard.

The museum had the displays you’d expect. A history of discrimination, photos and audio of protests and sit-ins. Video of news broadcasts and press conferences. It was a display in the middle of the museum, however, that caught my attention. This display was simply called “The Press.” It displayed headlines and front pages from the Little Rock crisis, and explained how in many cases, throngs of reporters and photographers took the brunt of protesters’ anger, acting as a buffer for the nine students.

I just started reading a book, “The Race Beat,” by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. I found it in the site’s museum. It’s a fascinating story about journalists’ role in the civil rights movement. In many cases, it’s not that these journalists “took sides.” It’s that they bothered to cover the movement and the inequality at all. It’s that they allowed civil rights leaders the opportunity to present their cases. The cause also showed up in staff editorials, when progressive editors, both black and white, called for change. It’s a powerful reminder of a free press’s necessary role in a democracy. One can’t exist without the other.

Reading about this time period reminds me of lessons I learned while in school. Journalists don’t exist in a vacuum. We’re not mindless automans, reading the weather and sports agate like robots. I also learned that while we should always strive for fair coverage, we should never think that fair automatically means equal. Or that equal automatically means fair.

The Fighting Beckets

One of the first things I learned about British universities was that they don’t have mascots. The Cambridge Bulldogs don’t square off against the Oxford Crimson. One of my friends at the University of Reading asked me, “What’s that big bird thing?” when he saw a photo of me with Big Jay. This fact of life seemed to amuse my father.

Candle marking the site of St. Thomas Becket's murder.

Candle marking the site of St. Thomas Becket's murder.

My dad asked me what the University of Kent’s mascot would be. We settled on the Fighting Beckets, a nod to St. Thomas Becket, who was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. It’s kind of hard to talk about Canterbury without mentioning the massive cathedral.

I’ve seen my share of European churches — St. Patrick’s, York Minster, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s, St. Stephen’s, Notre Dame, the Berliner Dom, Florence’s Duomo — but Canterbury is special.

In July 2011, I’ll have my graduation ceremony in Canterbury Cathedral. After my raucous graduation from KU last May, it’ll be a big change in tone. The campus of my graduate school, the University of Kent, is right up the road from the cathedral. It’s daunting to have such an important even in my life tied to a building and a city that’s centuries old.

Interior of Canterbury Cathedral.

Interior of Canterbury Cathedral.

I’m excited to go back to Canterbury (I visited three years ago when I studied abroad in Reading) and explore it more. I’m lucky that I’ll get to attend the school I wanted, and be only about half an hour away from London. It’s worth sitting out a year to have that experience.

And I know that whenever I go into the centre of Canterbury, I’ll be able to look up and see the cathedral.