When I was in high school, one of my favorite activities was writing for the school paper. I was shy, but being a student journalist gave me an excuse to ask all of the questions I secretly wanted to ask – how my classmates felt about our English curriculum, when they’d noticed the the mysterious spike in vending machine prices, or what students wanted out of our annual spirit week (more themed dress-up days was, sadly, rarely the answer). There’s nothing like trotting around school with an important mission.
Maybe this is why I’m such a fangirl of the Marfa Shorthorn Newsletter, a monthly, zine-sized missive of reported stories produced by the Marfa High School journalism class. The newsletter usually appears in stacks on the table in the center of the radio station. We pore over it, pass it around the office, and read excerpts aloud. It is supremely smart, informative, and entertaining. Each edition contains reported pieces on the goings-on of student life written by actual teens.
At Marfa ISD, enrollment tops out at around 190 students in a town stretching across a mere 1.6 square miles that largely runs on tourism – a roster of non-local guests that come and go and come and go until the end of time. It presents new challenges, and a different, more palpable kind of hyperawareness (and accompanying claustrophobia) that comes with teenage life.
Every school day, around 2:30, the journalism students file into Ms. Adele Powers’ classroom at Marfa ISD. Ms. Powers is also an art teacher, and her room is the platonic ideal of a classroom – it’s decorated wall to wall with photos and student art illuminated by string lights, top 40 playing at a low volume from a desktop computer. A soft grey rabbit named Buster usually hops around the floor, settling in the solitary dark of Ms. Powers’ desk as the journalism students take their seats at an array of round tables to talk about their stories. They put on their purple media badges to talk to friends and classmates about anything and everything – long distance relationships via Snapchat, dream vacations, the use of AI and much much more.
“All the lore gets dropped in the newsletter,” said Itzel Urrutia, a junior who’s been in journalism class for three years.
Urrutia is right. No one tells it like it is the way teens do. One of my very first assignments at Marfa Public Radio, nearly a decade ago, was to help out with the Youth Media Class at the high school, taught by brilliant former Marfa Public Radio producer Sally Beauvais. The result of that class was a podcast detailing teen life in Marfa – the joys of cruising around town listening to music, a report from the cafeteria, a deep dive into the then-burgeoning world of Airbnbs. (One of a few storytelling projects the station has done with the high school).
That time, a mere nine years ago, feels like an entirely different world. As I get older, I find that generation gaps are getting smaller – for example, friends just a couple of years younger than me don’t remember AOL Instant Messaging, or @sbcglobal.net email addresses. All of that is to say, teens these days use technologies and terms that are entirely unfamiliar to me – mysterious phrases like “hus,” “tea,” or “chopped.” Just days ago, members of the MPR staff engaged in a not-short conversation about the origin of the word “unc” – this author had heard it stemmed from “uncool” but in fact it is a shortened version of “uncle,” used to tease someone for being “old fashioned or out of touch.” The conversation only served to prove that I am, unfortunately, unc.
“ When you're talking to your friend who's about the same age, you don't need to explain what that is,” said journalism student junior Dariela Munoz. But in the newsletter, they do, which helps the community understand the teenage world. “We write about the way we see it,” said Munoz.
Journalism class also helps students talk to each other, discuss new things. “It’s kind of brought me out of my shell,” said senior Ayven Pippen. “I'm not really a very outgoing social person, so getting to interview people and ask them really deep questions and then, when they're giving really boring answers, I ask them more questions and really pry at them until they open up.”
In a way, while the high school students are translating their world to a broader, usually older audience, they’re also fostering a better understanding of each other. “You get to hear other people's points of view on whatever kind of subject,” said senior Isaiah Ramos. “And that also kind of feeds into your opinion. 'cause you're like, oh hey, well this person says this, you know, I understand where they're coming from.”
Over the past few months, I visited Ms. Powers’ classroom to help the journalism class bring their stories about teen life into audio. Using recording equipment, natural sounds, sound effects, and music, the journalism students made pieces that reflected their experiences with long distance relationships, pain and suffering, sports, the local carnival, student jobs, and what life might look like after senior year.
Through the magic of radio, these stories were then broadcast to Marfa Public Radio’s 30,000 square mile range – an area 18,750 times larger than the town itself. This is, at its best, the magic of radio – the widespread sharing of specific voices and experiences you might not otherwise hear.
Facilitating this class, I couldn’t help but fall in love with radio all over again. When the journalism students put on headphones for the first time and listened to the sounds of their own voices coming through the microphone, I saw them experience that unmistakable mix of shock, confusion, and delight – the very same I felt when I was first learning how to use audio equipment. A microphone and headphones create an incredibly unique sonic experience that turns the known into the unknown. Friends’ voices, the hum of the AC, the tinny sound of music out of the computer speakers are all familiar and yet, suddenly, become different. Their voices grew hushed then loud, hushed then loud again, as they jangled jewelry, clicked their tongues and snapped their fingers to test the limits of the machine.
One of the things you learn early on in radio is that even silence has a sound. Every room you step into has a tone entirely its own. Good radio hygiene means that at the end of every interview, you have to ask for your subject to be quiet, just to collect that tone, in service of making for a smooth edit. It’s a slightly annoying, slightly awkward ask in which, after conversing with someone for a long period of time, instead of hitting a beautiful natural end point and saying goodbye, you must essentially just sit in a room breathing as you count to 30 in your head. I will admit that after a long interview, I sometimes forget to do this.
As I was going through the tape the students collected, I was thrilled to find that at the end of his interview about his after-school job, I heard Isaiah Ramos gently remind his fellow journalist, “don’t forget to get 30 seconds of silence.” Total pro.
