Valley Perspective : Hands-On Experience Most Valuable Lesson : Classes in which students produce something, such as a school newspaper, help them learn teamwork firsthand as well as how to approach all kinds of problems.

Three days to publication and the journalism classroom at Birmingham High School looks like the Los Angeles Times in miniature. Students write last-minute articles, proofread copy, examine, criticize and change layout, argue over headlines and bylines, debate front-page articles. When the dismissal bell rings at 3:05, no one leaves. Students know what has to be done to send the Courier to the printing company at 8 a.m.

When the 3,000 papers arrive, we sort them by homeroom and stuff fliers advertising driving schools, tanning salons, tuxedo rentals and pagers. Friday morning we distribute on campus and mail to high schools throughout the city.

Then the journalism students wait for the compliments and criticisms they know will come.

Publishing a student newspaper is an authentic learning experience, not a textbook exercise to earn grades and accumulate credits toward graduation. The only blanks the journalism students come across are the 16 blank pages they have to fill every four weeks. There are no assigned vocabulary lists to memorize. When they are stuck for a word, they go to a thesaurus without being reminded. They know late work, no matter how much time and effort they put into it, doesn’t get published. Deadlines mean just that.

Much is being written about different learning styles and the need for teachers to use strategies to reach all students. I don’t have to give it a thought. On the newspaper staff, students find their own niches.

Danny seldom leaves the computer. Robert single-handedly sells advertisements, $300 to $500 an issue. Student readers turn to Kim’s horoscopes first. Iris and Edward touched a nerve when they reported on sexual harassment on campus. Jason can give Siskel and Ebert a run when it comes to movie reviews. Milt covers new teachers, drama news and anything else he can get his hands on. He is a junior with plans of becoming senior editor next year.

Student journalists--freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, C-average to A, are dependent on one another. I don’t have to hound them to do their jobs. When one doesn’t, it reflects on the rest. They either all win, or all lose.

We deal with questions of ethics every day. Are teachers and administrators, star athletes and club presidents public figures on campus? If an athlete is ineligible to play because his grades are too low, is that his business or is it news? It takes money to run the paper, so do we accept ads from anyone willing to pay? If students are not allowed to carry pagers, can we still advertise them in the school paper? Do we cover fights on campus? Drug busts? Theft? We don’t want outsiders to think we have a bad school, but is not reporting self-imposed censorship?

The students are learning about the power of the printed word to incite, to inform and entertain, to wound and to praise. Outside of class we defend one another and everything in the paper, but among ourselves we consider carefully each of the many letters to the editor we receive. Publishing a school newspaper is heady and humbling and real.

Maybe high schools have it all wrong. Perhaps we should stress the basics less and push students into production classes. A group assigned to write a textbook, rather than read one, is going to learn a lot more about history--and writing, researching, teamwork, compromise and revisionist view. Students learn more about food and nutrition running a catering company, seeking clients, marketing their wares, than they will studying the four basic--or is it five basic?--food groups. Classify the student population into taxonomies, kingdoms, families and genus and you are studying biology and anatomy, debating the definition of race and the role culture plays.

I had a traditional education studying all the basics, yet I remember almost nothing I learned in high school. I was so busy earning high grades to get into college that I didn’t take time for extras. But it’s the extras, like drama, sports, band and cheerleading, debate and speech team, yearbook and journalism, to name a few, that make high school a worthwhile learning experience, not just a steppingstone to college or a place to mark time before getting a job.

I look back over the years I’ve taught English and wonder how much of what I did stuck--probably not much.

On the other hand, I have no doubt what my students do in journalism, without much help from me, will serve them well in the future.

After all, everything my students need to know about getting along in the world, they’re learning in journalism. (Well, maybe not everything, but a lot.)