I spent most of this morning and early afternoon volunteering as a workshop monitor for the Media Matters Writing Conference at UMass Boston. I've looked into volunteering with teens as a regular writing mentor or tutor, but all of the organizations I've found have required more of a time commitment than I can afford to give (usually one full day per week, which would make it difficult to meet deadlines and whatnot). So I figured volunteering for part of the day would be both personally and professionally fulfilling, because I could attend a bunch of free workshops and indirectly help students improve their writing.
During a morning workshop on brainstorming, the instructor asked students to describe an orange. Most of them used generic terms like "round" and "orange" (as in the color - tricky!). One boy pronounced the fruit "spherical and orange-tinted." Then the instructor pointed out that individual oranges have distinctive properties and if you spent long enough observing a single orange, you could pick it out among a bowl of other oranges because of little variations in shape and hue.
Then in the afternoon, I listened to Boston Globe's Sports Editor Joe Sullivan discuss the future of journalism. Considering how much upheaval the Globe has experienced in the last few years, Sullivan was remarkably upbeat (he clearly loves his job, which helps a lot). He predicted that newspapers will not become extinct in our lifetime, because "people still want to know things." Sullivan added that companies like the Globe need to think of themselves as "news organizations" rather than "newspapers" and journalists need to learn how to use the web effectively and create multimedia in addition to writing well.
But perhaps the most quotable moment of the day came when a middle schooler told the instructor of the brainstorming workshop she'd been "sort of published." To which the instructor asked, "Can you be sort of pregnant? How can you be sort of published?" Good point.