The assignment was to take a page from the latest edition of the yet-to-be published student newspaper and find mistakes. Fun, right?

What 20-year-old doesn’t want to pour over literally thousands of words to find missing commas, misspelled words, spacing errors and design flaws?

Yet here is this student in the back of the room with their hand basically touching the ceiling of the classroom – on every one of the 8-page paper.

Skyler was fired up to share their findings – even before classmates who were assigned that particular page had shared theirs. That’s usually the order – let those assigned the page talk first, then others can chime in on their catches.

Didn’t stop Skyler’s hand from staying up though!  

And it was infectious.

Skyler was raising the bar and others were playing along – chiming in on their findings on pages they too weren’t assigned.

It was engagement at its best – and something a professor dreams of.

I loved it.

The class at Vermont State University Castleton is called Pages & Posts and students learn about journalistic editing, page design, and social media uses. They do biweekly posts that often appear on The Castleton Spartan social media channels (Facebook and Instagram) and website (www.castletonspartan.com).

We do a class every two weeks called Post-Talk, where they display their videos, photos, reviews and news briefs and we critique and praise them as a class. The goal is to drive traffic to the sites and get usable content for their portfolios.  

But a cornerstone of the class in recent years has been the editing-of-the-Spartan component. And for whatever reason, students seem to get into it. It must almost be like a treasure hunt to find the littlest mistake that’s going to make my eyes bulge and say “NIIIICE CATCH!!!

I think they like when my eyes bulge.

Did everyone in class crush it? No. A couple mailed it in. That’s normal in any class. But given the atmosphere of the class, the friendly competition and Skyler setting the bar above the door casing, perhaps they’ll play along next time.

And for those of you still saying, ‘yeah, sounds real fun Dave,’ I leave you with this.

On one page, a student in the class was quoted as saying “Oh, this one really suck out.”

It was in a story about the social media assignment editor of the Washington Post who Zoomed into my class to let students know all the social media possibilities at a major daily paper.

The student obviously meant “stuck” out – and another student caught it.

We all laughed at the mistake, noted the correction, and moved on to the next misplaced comma.

And now the assignment editor of the Washington Post, if she reads it, won’t get a laugh or think less of us.

NIIIIICE CATCH!!!!