14th "Meeting"

Haha, exams are really brutal. I missed last week.
But anyways, on the 13th, we had the last "meeting" of the year.
In actuality, I asked my members to not come
and I instead talked and thanked my sponsor teachers.

With that, this completes my Skills hours by EXACTLY 6 months and a day.

I've learned a lot by managing a club,
and I feel that I've acquired important skills.

13th Meeting

Unfortunately, on this meeting's day there was a bunch of other stuff happening. The meetings have died down a little bit since all it was about was what members were going to write about. I think my members know what to do already.

There are 2 members I'm a bit worried about though. The same people didn't update in time, and it's been them for the whole time we've been doing this. I remind them and try not to be someone who constantly hunts for them everytime they miss a day, but at the same time I feel that I should have been more assertive towards them.

It's almost the end of the year and I've talked to them, so that's all I can do, really.
At least for the next school year I know what I'll need to improve on.

12th Meeting + Inside look

Not much happened during the week. We met in the library again and the meeting was about was making sure that the members knew what to write about.

So I thought I'd take the time to show you a few things about the club.

 This is where the meetings normally take place. Over the last two weeks we had to meet in the school library because of a tapestry signing event and for another busy thing happening with the sponsor teacher.

Haha, you can see my backpack and books.

I have pictures of most of my members, but I'm not sure whether or not they would be okay with their picture being on the internet. As well, my folks have a thing about me getting my picture taken/seen by people they (and possibly I) don't know.

So here is the picture of the room we use.

Since it's an info-tech room full of computers (yeah, they're not the newest, but they work great!) I'm able to show my members what our paper looks like and what happens with their articles and, when we first started, those tutorials from a while back.

Aaah... Memories.

Anyways, this room is also a vital area because, for one, it's in the busiest part of the school.

There have been many a time (well, not many, but it happened a couple of times) where I would find members who missed a meeting during lunch.

It helps a lot because then I'm able to talk to them RIGHT after the meeting, which is good since I can tell them what we did while it's still a fresh memory in mind.

Anyways, this is all I have to write about for now. The school year is almost up, meaning the meetings will start drawing to a close. I really enjoyed the year, but before I start doing the "year-end reflection" I'll keep looking forward!

10th and 11th Meeting

I felt that these two meetings should be mentioned in one post since they were somewhat related to eachother.

Anyways, the 10th meeting was on May 16th. I went to the usual room and saw that there were a lot of people; not members but other students, inside. It was really crowded and after observing a bit, I saw that it was my sponsor teacher's students who were frantically submitting a project. I waited a bit and not many members showed up; I think at most there were two, so I talked to those members and the meeting was done.
It turns out that the members thought there would be no meeting since the room was so crowded. Seeing that the room would be crowded again for something very important in the school, I told them to meet me in the library for the next two meetings. I'm glad I did that since the room did turn out to be crowded the next week.

The 11th meeting was then held in the library on May 23rd. When I entered the library and saw my members, I had great news! You see, the day before, I went to the library and signed out two, very good digital cameras. It was perfect timing as well since on the 23rd we had a carnival in our school. When I showed them the cameras, I assigned one to one of my members to take pictures of the event happening inside our regular room (the event that made us move into the library was for a sick teacher) and the other to a member for taking pictures of the carnival. She gave it to her sister, who I personally know, and she took pictures of the carnival for us in the evening.
So far, article wise, I'm very proud of majority of my members. There are a few; who are very trustworthy and hardworking in their own ways, who haven't submitted articles on time. I've talked to them, so hopefully they'll be able to catch up for this week.

I'm still very proud of the paper and the members nonetheless.

9th Meeting

It was really eventful on the 9th!
One member that was gone for the other few meetings came back; she was sick,
so I updated her on the things that we were able to do over the past couple of months.
She's going to be doing an advice column for the paper, so that'll hopefully attract a lot of attention in our school.

There are other meetings happening in the school on Thursdays
so some members haven't been able to attend some meetings.
But thankfully, majority of them have Facebook so I've been keeping them up to date with it.

Lately I've been really promoting the paper as well.
I've sent e-mails to teachers whom I'm close with,
tweets to some teachers that have lots of followers in the school,
and I even posted stuff on Facebook.
I requested that the school website has the paper there as well,
and right now the site is under maintenance.
So I hope that's a good sign.

I really want this paper to be popular among our school.
It will, for one, voice out all the members' opinions
and at the same time it will pressure them to keep up with things.

That's all I have to say about last meeting.
I can't wait for next Thursday!

8th Meeting

May 2nd, 2013.

It was a great meeting day today! Everyone was pumped since we were able to get a lot of page views! We had about 60, if I can remember correctly.

On this meeting, we decided to break our "one-article-per-person" limits and decided to do do tons of things for the paper! Myself and one of the members are going to collaborate on a paper about the political people that came to our school on Wednesday the 1st, and that same member is going to get a short story from her friend and make a "Guest Writer" post!

As well, another member is going to write a poem and possibly something else. The other two members I have will write about entertainment; one will write about music vidoes, the other will write a review of Iron Man 3. My comic drawer is making the comic as I type, and we decided to make it a bi-weekly thing so that it's easier for her to plan/draw things out.

Everything is going very smoothly, but I can't help but be a bit worried about my task for this week. Since the member who wrote about sports doesn't want to write about it anymore, I have to fill it in. I'm not necessarily upset, since I love sports, but I might have a hard time getting things from school or from other sources since I'm not the "sport savvy" type and can hardly tell the difference from a "clean hit"  to a "bad hit" in hockey.

I'll do my best though, everyone seems to be pulling their own; if not more, weight in this club. I'm very happy I could get them involved like this.

Oh, as well, a girl did the vow of silence a long while ago, but never published her article about it. I'm happy to say that my sponsor teacher recommended that we post it anyways. It's an important issue to address, so I really hope she remembers to publish this time.

7th Meeting

Yesterday on the 25th of April, I talked about various things.
Here are the notes I made for the meeting (along with notes added after with a *)

---

Entertainment: *Iron Man 3 preview - S. D.
Sports: *Rugby Season - K. H.
Current Events: *Spirit Week - Me
Other: *Drawing/comic: Mascot comics - N. K (I'll help with ideas)
Other: *Poems/LGBT Stuff: A. W.
Mrs. P is going to put the newspaper link on the school website
COMMITMENT! We need it!
I'll ask Mrs. Painchaud to put reminders every Wednesday that there's Newspaper Club on the day after. E.g. "A reminder that tomorrow there's a Newspaper Club meeting at lunch in B111"
and on Thursdays: "Newspaper Club is meeting today at B111 at lunch".

---

That's basically what happened.
I was able to discuss all the plans for this week's edition and get people committed to the club still.
I'm really glad with what's happened so far with the club.
I know that I've been saying that I was worried that things would fall apart,
but so far they're starting to look up!

I need to remember that some members need to be reminded every once in a while,
and that not all members have phones/Facebook so I'll need to contact them personally.

But so far I'm really excited for our first, full issue!