School magazine = CAS hours

[Guest]

Hey, fellas.

I need some help coming up with ideas for content in our new school magazine. Ideas so far have been teacher/former student interviews, what makes our IB better than other IB schools in the area, etc.

Ant help would be appreciated.

The reason this thread is in the CAS section is because I (and other people who want to contribute) would get CAS hours for it; I therefore need ideas that could translate to spending time creating said content.

Edited September 20, 2011 by Guest

[dessskris]

can I get hours too for thinking how to help you?

is this like a weekly magazine or something like that? what about quizzes, crossword puzzle, horoscope, comics, polls, etc.?

why not have a look at local magazines or newspapers for students? there's one in my area and it's very nice in terms of the contents.

[Arrowhead]

Desy has a good point. What about a "Page 3"-esque section? When I started the newspaper in my school, students would crowd to get copies, throw away most of it, and only pick up the "rumours" and "did you know?" and "guess who got caught doing..." and "they're together!" sections. There is a certain allure to being the paparazzi and dishing all the deets of the "it" couples in school and finding skeletons in closets (PG-13 of course and never too mean). We once did a feature of all the make-out/public sex spots around campus (in hindsight that wasn't a very good decision to expose those places but at least the papers sold!).

Interviews and "oh our school is wonderful" is such a boring thing to do! Every school newspaper does exactly that. We used to sell ours because the school stopped funding us after we did an exposé on one of our teacher's ineptitude at teaching English (and that may have been accompanied with a quarter-page candid of him smoking in the bathroom with the title, "Hard at Work!") We had to start selling our papers since we were funding ourselves (and secretly using the school copy machines at the crack of dawn).

There used to be funny sections, we dedicated a column for romantic (i.e. sex) advise to Miss Ima Phukya (I know it's juvenile but we always had a good laugh at that name).

We maintained a literary section, so what we would do is keep a box outside our "office" (i.e. closet-like space on campus, not nearly enough to fit ten highly stressed-out, overachieving IB students with full schedules and perverted and twisted senses of humour) and we would invite students to submit any short stories, poems, fragmented or broken ideas, comic strips, story boards, et al in our box, with their name or anonymously. Out of the 15-30 submissions we would get every month, easily 75% would be anonymous (and the anonymous work tended to be better than others). We would always dedicate a page to these works or caricatures, comic strips, or drawings. Some of these would be truly hilarious, I remember one from a student who drew a comic strip of our Physics professor lecturing and the entire class sleeping away.

We would also have a page dedicated to global events, our Economics teacher at school loved the free-spirited nature of our paper and he would make his Economics classes write articles on pertinent world events every first Friday of the month and give us all the submissions, we would always feature one of his student's articles.

There would be a page on suggestions for things to see: plays, movies, and so on that were occurring locally. We were at a boarding school in a small village in Switzerland, so opportunities off campus were thoroughly enjoyed whenever we got the opportunity. We would even include local news like the firemen saving another cat, a new (and first) falafel shop that opened up in the village (with an interview of the Turkish chef), and so on.

There is so much you can do and have so much fun doing it. I was Junior Editor and "star" reporter, I submitted four editions of our paper to The Times of India offices in Bombay one summer and they gave me a two week (non paid ) internship opportunity. It was pretty fantastic.

Be a little opportunistic and bold, think outside the box and give it a 100%. We too originally revived our Newspaper for CAS purposes, but it evolved into so much more and it was sh*tloads of fun along the way, which made it all the more worth it.

[CutielovesChocs]

Arrowhead and Desy both have amazing ideas!

I would say that you might wanna put something that just seems out of place or something going on in the school that no one has even heard of. For example, we did a small story on a pair of ducks that seemed to gather around whenever we had lunch and break outside the cafeteria. The left right after and seemed to know exactly when we had our breaks in school - including bake sales

It seemed pretty weird, but after that point, the students and school had almost adopted them