I’ve never written a column before. Working for the Post, it seems like I encounter something new every day, something I’ve never had to do before, something I have to learn. And journalism has a sink-or-swim learning style.

It’s at moments like these that I think back on my education — the moments when I’m not sure what to do, when I walk into a board meeting and am uncertain what I’ll hear or how I’ll boil down that mass of information, or moments when I ask questions I don’t know the answers to and the times when I haven’t hammered out an angle and am struggling to find a direction for a story.

It’s a different context, but I’ve found that a few of the lessons I learned in school still apply. One, write everything down — you never know what will be on the test. Two, you never stop learning. While that first lesson is useful for getting my daily assignments done, it’s the second I find I’m most thankful for.

And that was something I gained in the school system. This school system. With the exception of high school, all of my education took place in Rowan County. I’ve run the gamut on different types of schooling available to local students: public school, private school, charter school, community college and a four-year institution. And now I’m working in the town I grew up in, for the same paper that I interned with, covering the same schools that gave me my education.

It’s not what I pictured myself doing — I always wanted to live and work in lots of different places around the country and around the world. But I feel like this is an opportunity. It’s a chance to learn more about the place I grew up and the system that helped make me the person I am today. It’s a chance to learn more about the issues that affected my teachers, and in turn, their classrooms. After all these years, I am still their student.

Despite attending Rowan-Salisbury schools, and despite coming from a family of educators, there is still so much I don’t know about education as a topic. The behind the scenes, the meetings, teachers’ long hours and fevered planning for a better class, a better school, a better life for their students — these are all things I need to learn. And because I had some truly wonderful teachers who taught me to love learning, these are all things I’m excited to learn.

I feel like I’ve arrived on the education beat at an exciting time. There’s a proposal to make Knox Middle a year-round magnet school, technology is transforming and uniquely tailoring instruction, there’s an application to create a charter school in East Spencer — a town that’s been without a school since the 1980s. Schools are slowly changing mindset and pushing to prepare students for life instead of just for a test or just for college — though those are undeniably important.

I can’t wait to cover these things, to help tell these stories, because I think they’re stories worthy of being told. And I hope that, along the way, I’ll make my former teachers proud.

 

Contact education reporter Rebecca Rider at 704-797-4264 or rebecca.rider@salisburypost.com