The Unspoken Lesson by Raquele

The Unspoken Lesson by Raquele - June 2019 Scholarship Essay

I had one of my teachers all four years of high school for Intro to Journalism and for Yearbook. Although both classes were easy to learn in and pretty self explanatory once the routine was normalized, I learned way more than I realized.
Mr. Paddock taught me to use photoshop, how to make great stories, how to use certain softwares, but he also taught me that in order to be successful, the outside of comfort zones are the most important ingredient.
I joined yearbook the first year I could which was sophomore year. Everyone was pretty much on the same page: striving for a better book than all the last. We wanted more coverage, more pictures, better stories, better layouts. We wanted the best. The only thing was we had no idea how to make things better and Mr. Paddock was not going to tell us how to make our book.
This resulted in many failed pages, many messed up names, and eventually many complaints, because in certain ways we did the same thing as the last staff. However, as I grew throughout the years in the class, I started noticing the things we were doing wrong. Once senior year hit, my best friend was Editor in Chief and I helped her design the book. We removed pages that were not relevant and started paying attention to the number of times people were in the book. We did the best we could to include everyone in the book as well as get the best stories possible.
On top of all the changes to our traditional book, we created different layouts that could fit more people on a page and give a feeling of excitement. Our spring opener page for example, was made so that the pictures would create a butterfly on the page.
Of course, in order to perfect the yearbook, I stayed up countless hours and nights fixing the smallest flaws, contacting people I’d never met, taking suggestions and blindly trying new ideas.
If Mr. Paddock would have told us how to fix our flaws, he wouldn’t have been encouraging us to step outside of our comfort zone or use our imagination, and because he didn’t help us in giving us ideas or pointers, he helped us in growing, becoming hard workers, and learning to be successful.