Regina Buddies join with Triad(s)

I.J. Samson Junior High School
St. John's, Newfoundland

By Jon M. and Tim R. (Grade 9)

"She's crazy boys, break out the tazers."

That's what most of us were thinking when our esteemed English teacher broke to us the news that she was allowing a group of journalism students from Regina, Saskatchewan, to "critique" our hard work.

Our Regina Buddies (don't laugh: our teacher makes us call them that) attend the University of Regina school of journalism. Most of them are around 21 and are third- or fourth-year students. At first, the idea of letting these mainlanders pick apart our island genius seemed kind of freaky. But now it's starting to become wholesome fun for all of us. This is mainly because we have been responding to their work which is posted on their website every Friday (www.uregina.ca/~journal). But once we start posting our work and they begin to go at it with their delete and backspace buttons we may change our minds about the validity of their so-called "experience".

All of us over here on the Rock have a long-distance relationship through electronic mail with our "Buddies". Because we live so far away from each other it would be impossible to have them come in every Friday to read our material and because the school budget has gone to Hades in a hand basket we can't very well call them up and ask their opinions on the use of a sentence. That's why we've turned to e-mail. Some people find using e-mail a bit intimidating, and some people enjoy it and are using it every day. Some of the relationships have been forming nicely. We have organized ourselves into groups of three (we're calling these "triads") and each group has one mentor. This has proved to be a very good method because the group learns more about one person when all three have input.

Our class, as a whole, is very interested in this project. Although there are some who don't really have an interest in writing, most people find it exhilarating to read our buddies' articles. We feel that we've really gotten to know these people, and look forward to reading what they've come up with each week. We are into our second draft of our first piece of writing, and will be starting our website for this on Thursday, Feb. 27th. At that point our buddies will be responding to our writing. In conclusion, we shall put away our tazers (but keep the tear gas just in case) because maybe this is not as crazy as we thought it was.

(Editor's note: "tazers", so they tell me, are long-range stun guns)

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