Jason Brent Johnson is a piece of shit

And I know that is libel, but whatever.

So I had this teacher for newswriting last semester who I thought would be great, because he's a full-time staff writer for the Chronicle and has a truly impressive resume of jobs and internships. Unfortunately, he was a terrible educator. And what's worse, he was completely unwilling to improve his skills. Okay, if a staff position isn't hacking it and you want to make a little money on the side, do what everyone else does and freelance. Don't teach a college class -- full of intelligent adults, some of which will be as old if not older than you are -- unless you truly enjoy it.

So I spent three a hours a week last semester in Mr. Johnson's class, supposedly getting an introduction to the art of newswriting. Things started off well enough, but then he announced that we'd have a weekly quiz of ten questions taken from the Chronicle. That's right. We were to read the Chronicle cover to cover every day and then be quizzed on it. Aside from that fact that I was taking four other upper division classes, working, and reading the stupid text book for this class already, who even remembers EVERY SINGLE article they read in the newspaper? Needless to say I tanked these quizzes. He also gave us an AP style book quiz on the second class meeting, without ever having explained to us what the book was. He didn't tell us to study it, or even tell us, "don't forget, AP style quiz next week." Nope. He wrote it on his inaccurate syllabus and that was the end of it.

He read my first writing assignment in front of the class. So apparently, it was good enough to be published. I had taken journalism in high school, but he didn't know that. Did I mention that he assigned this first story to us without first practicing writing a full story in class? Yeah. We had written a couple leads, a couple nut graphs, and then it was, "ok kids, 500 word story. And I want interviews, but I'm not going to tell you that before you turn it in."

So after I received a C+ in this class because I hate reading the newspaper, I was pissed. I got A's on every single writing assignment and turned in all of my homework, but apparently that wasn't the ass-backwards point he was trying to prove. I managed to swing an A- in fucking statistics, but got my ass kicked in J221.

Up until now, it may seem that my grade was in proportion to my effort. However, it must be mentioned that in our review session for the final, he was still clarifying to several people in our class that a lead was supposed to contain about 50 words. As much as Olaina is a bitch, in that journalism class we learned how to write about 5 different kinds of stories and put together an 8 page newspaper in the time that this guy couldn't get across how to write a lead, let alone an entire story. Granted, I'm sure there were some idiots in that class, but if he hadn't wasted so much time on news quizzes and pod casts and other extraneous stuff, we might've actually mastered NEWSWRITING.

So I ran into Erna Smith, chair of the department and former Wall Street Journal reporter, in the pub lab yesterday and she asked me what I was doing for the summer. She asked me what I got in newswriting, I told her, and she said, "yeah, I saw that, and I thought, 'that can't be Meghann'." So there you have it. This woman has never seen me write more than a 2 page book critique and she knew that I couldn't have screwed over newswriting so badly.

So good riddance, Mr. Johnson. I'm sure I'll have a great time explaining the only C of my entire college career in my grad school interviews.