{"id":573887951,"date":"2015-04-30T23:36:25","date_gmt":"2015-05-01T04:36:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/?p=573887951"},"modified":"2015-05-11T16:09:54","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T21:09:54","slug":"they-keep-us-young","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/blog\/2015\/04\/30\/they-keep-us-young\/","title":{"rendered":"They keep us young"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>They keep us young. <\/p>\n<p>Last night the incoming editor-in-chief of The Samford Crimson poked her head into my office. I was just about ready to call it a night, but students will make you stick around. <\/p>\n<p>Emily is this year&#8217;s news editor and she is, as they almost always are at the paper, one squared away individual. She asked me a question about this and we talked about that and then the next thing you know we&#8217;d spent an hour discussing journalism and what our newsroom can be. She left at 8 p.m.<\/p>\n<p>Someone asked me a few years ago why it is I want to do this kind of work. And there&#8217;s the answer: It is important to the community, but even more so to the students I get to work with. When you have passionate college students doing work they care about, you&#8217;re surrounded by a special treat, indeed. Those people deserve as much passion as energy as you can give back. It only makes them better.<\/p>\n<p>And to have the opportunity to work with enthusiastic young men and women so dedicated to learning their craft is simply invigorating.<\/p>\n<p>They asked me that when I interviewed for the job here, too. I went through the importance part and the passion part and the influence my media adviser had when I was in school and then I said &#8220;Plus, maybe they&#8217;ll keep me young!&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The guy that asked me that just retired last year. He&#8217;d watched his second grandchild go through college. Now he goes out and runs four or five miles every day. He agreed with my answer during the interview, I remember it clearly. He knew about students keeping the rest of us young.<\/p>\n<p>The shortest answer, as this year winds down, is that it is a treat, and worth it, and hardly seems like working. And weaved among all of that is a great value. <\/p>\n<p><center><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/photo\/apr15\/apr56.jpg\" alt=\"sunset\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s only one more week with this year&#8217;s talented crew. Four of the nucleus I work with are graduating. I&#8217;ll break them all down next week after our last, and surely poignant meetings. But first there&#8217;s another paper to get through and the departmental picnic and then lost last gatherings. <\/p>\n<p>They keep us young.<\/p>\n<p>I have a small and growing mound of papers to grade. We can blame the silver hair on that. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>They keep us young. Last night the incoming editor-in-chief of The Samford Crimson poked her head into my office. I was just about ready to call it a night, but students will make you stick around. Emily is this year&#8217;s news editor and she is, as they almost always are at the paper, one squared [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,7,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-573887951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photo","category-samford","category-thursday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573887951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=573887951"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573887951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573887952,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/573887951\/revisions\/573887952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=573887951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=573887951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kennysmith.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=573887951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}