Teaching at 53? Are you kidding?

       After 30 years in the TV business, I have started a teaching career. I am the Broadcasting teacher at Morristown High School in New Jersey. I have started taking Master's degree classes, I am required to take 200 hours of "Alternate Route" teacher training, and I am wearing "Dockers".

From 1991 until November 2009, I was a senior director for the cable television network Court TV. I directed some of the most famous or infamous trials of the past two decades. O.J. Simpson, Jeffrey Dahmer, Scott Peterson, Michael Jackson, etc., etc. I could go in a million different directions at this time, but I will stay on topic and focus on the challenge of teaching television and radio in the digital age.

Who are my students? We had the Baby Boomers, Generation X, Generation Y, and Generation Z . I like to think of my students as the "Digital Generation". Do they know what videotape is? How about cassettes or 8-tracks? Are the terms rewind or fast forward in their vocabularies? What is a DJ? Mr. Butler is it true there were under 10 TV stations available when you were a kid? The "Digital Generation" comprehends upload, share, Google, gigs, megs, ram, playlists, iTunes, post, HTML, HTTP, WWW, and .com.

My students need to be engaged, and don't want to sit through lectures, They have incredible computer and technology skills. Despite these skills, students need to learn production techniques, production values, camera and audio basics, show layouts, script writing, and much more.


I hope to share my 30 years of professional TV experience with my students. I also hope to learn from them. What do they like to watch, listen to, play, read, blog, text, surf? Let's explore the new media together. Let's create new media through new technology.