Adviser Update
DJNF Teacher of the Year
P01.V52.I4
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SUMMER 2013
Page 10A
Go Sweep
Life is a series of startings-over
By Ellen Austin
A
lmost 30 years ago, I
sat at a seminar table
in a corporate training
room at the headquarters of
a Fortune 500 company in St.
Louis, a newly-minted college
graduate with a business
degree, eager to embark on
my sure-to-be–awesome
marketing career.
A smartly-dressed top
executive stepped into the
room to talk to our crop of
rising young leaders-to-be. As
he began to speak, I opened
my leather portfolio, picked up
my Cross pen (a graduation
gift) and started taking notes.
His words would surely be
inspirational, and surely
would provide the key ticket to
business success.
What he said was instead
surprising.
He said, “Life is a series
of startings-over. You start
something new and show
up on the first day. Then,
somebody hands you a broom
and says, ‘Go sweep over
there.’ So you go sweep.
“That’s what a new job or
new beginning is,” he said.
“That’s what this new job is.
You were in college, you got
it all done, you got to the top
where you know what to do …
and then you get here.
“Here, you’ll start sweeping
and learning. And when you
learn enough and get good
at the things there are in this
position, you’ll go after the
next position. You’ll get it, then
you’ll show up next day, ready
for anything.
“And then someone like me
will walk in, hand you a broom,
and say, ‘Go sweep.’”
At the time, as a 23-yearold full of expectations and
self-importance, I found his
advice puzzling, maybe even
off-topic.
But as time has passed, his
words have become prescient,
a wise way to look at the work
of a lifetime.
Embedded in his advice is
the idea of a learning curve,
the concept that each new
position or skill will require
incremental steps and
sequences along the way to
mastery.
Implicit in that advice is a
suggestion of patience and
compassion with the process.
For me, startings-over meant
departing the career path with
leather portfolios, Cross pens,
and corporate headquarters to
pursue, first, photography and
then, later, a teaching career.
At every transition, I showed
up to find that someone
handed me (kindly) the
metaphorical broom and said,
“Go sweep.”
As teachers, we know the
world of startings-over better
than perhaps any other sector.
Every spring, we watch our
hard work of the previous year
walk out of our classrooms
and eventually off our
campuses. Seniors especially
stride across the campuses
and quads, poised and
assured, commanding those
last months of high school. Yet
in just a few months, they will
experience their own collegiate
edition of, “Welcome. Here’s
the broom.”
Each successive fall brings
us a fresh calendar, a fresh
start, fresh faces in the
desks. We push the “do-over”
button on our curriculum,
and we revise, re-work, and
re-envision what we have
done before, knowing that we
will revise and revisit it again
the next year.
As journalism advisers, this
happens at micro levels with
our publications, too. Each
issue of our print editions,
each update to the website,
each yearbook deadline
submitted is a “starting over”
point. It’s a chance to try
again, to innovate, to correct,
to re-think.
Oddly, however, this idea
of seeing each part of the
process as slowly-evolving
and adapting is a concept
with which the current crop
of students I’m meeting now
seems to struggle.
Lately, I’ve noticed that
being comfortable with the
ambiguity of process, or trying
something right now, knowing
that you need to do it again,
and again, and again, seems
to be a conceptual hurdle and
source of frustration.
No wonder. Our students
have grown up in the postGoogle world, where a tough
conceptual question can be
answered immediately by a
handheld online search.
At the same time, they
are also coming of age with
tremendous fear that putting a
step wrong anyplace — on an
assignment, in an online post
to their friends, in their college
app — could cause a domino
effect of trouble.
This is different than the
world of my childhood. The
high-stakes, high-pressure
fishbowl that more and more
children grow up in can lead
kids simply to avoid trying
something which will not
succeed on the first try.
They want to skip the broom
entirely, for fear that they
might not sweep right.
So they avoid the camera,
or avoid trying a long feature,
or avoid calling the senator’s
office for an interview, for fear
they might not do it right.
Recently, I sent my
photographers off to take
photos around the University
of Nevada (Reno) campus
at our Northern California
summer workshop,
RENOvation.
The designed activity in
action photography involved
photographing each other as
they test-flew paper airplanes.
It would require dozens of
tries to get it “just right,”
with a certainty that the first
many a [\