In the spirit of our issue, of counting things, of making things count, and not just going through the motions– I counted up the publications, pages, hours and people that have shaped me as a teacher. Here are some standouts from my ten years of advising– 

• 117 issues of Crier (118 if you include this one!)
• 11 editions of Paragon
• Approximately 1,200 pages of Crier sent to press– including some national award-winning front pages, but also more mistakes that I’d care to recount or rehash or republish.
• Exactly 2,304 pages of Paragon, including spring supplements, which we started creating in 2018 so we could hand out the book in May before the end of the school year. To have a complete book, we’d have to stay into June and wait for the book to arrive in August.
• 187 Crier staffers
• 192 Paragon staffers
• 1,922 hours after school for Crier alone – including one night during the peak of the budget crisis (and 50 people were losing their jobs because of a lack of funding) when we submitted the paper at 2 a.m. We got it by 6 a.m.– we were lucky our printer at the time, Lithotype, ran a 24-hour press.
• 1,925 hours after school for Paragon. I’m likely undercounting. Up until this year, we’d have to submit each page twice, first on deadline and then second on proof. Sometimes the proof pages took just as much time as the deadline pages.
• In total, I have spent at least 3,847 hours after school working with my publications students: over three full years of school– after school!– devoted to nothing but getting as-good-as-possible work to print and into your hot little hands.

I’m both in awe of the numbers and also not. Sometimes reducing things to a count dehumanizes it all, and there’s so much I want to say about these numbers. My fingers are itching to add more, to explain, to name, to reflect. 

But it’s deadline day and I have no more time.

So I’ll leave it at this: some of these things I achieve by going through the motions, putting one foot in front of another, day by day, til it was done. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that: even a mindless step is still a step.