Teaching ToThe Test Pattern: Jamey Trask from Fayetteville High School (GA)
A kid turns in a project. It's fine. It's turned in on time, the audio is clean, nothing is broken. And Jamey hands it back and says go fix it. Not because it failed. Because it wasn't there yet.
I sat down with Jamey Trask from Fayette County at the Georgia ACTE conference, and somewhere between him getting photobombed and me butchering the name of his school, he said the thing that every great broadcast teacher knows and almost nobody says out loud. "I'm going to tell you if it sucks. And then I'm going to tell you how to fix it."
That's it. That's the whole job.
If you're newer, this is the hard part. You don't have the reps yet. So the tough grade reads as "the teacher doesn't like me," and the kid shuts down. The fix isn't to go soft. The fix is to say the quiet part first. Jamey tells them up front. I'm going to grade you tough at the beginning. Here's why. This is about my expectations, not my taste.
That line matters more than it sounds. Because so much of grading in our rooms feels subjective, and a kid will read your standards as your preferences. You have to pull those apart for them out loud. It's not me versus you. It's not whether I like it. It's whether it meets what this should be.
So if you're sitting in that gap right now, the one between "good enough" and "go back," let me give you the move I watched Jamey make.
Stop grading in private.
Pick one project this week. Before they ever turn it in, tell the kid exactly what you're going to be tough on and exactly why. Frame it as expectations, not taste. Then when it comes back not quite there, hand it back with the two specific things to fix and one sentence about where it's headed. Not "this is wrong." Try "this is close, fix these two things, and it runs on the show."
Then put it on the show.
That's the part that makes the redo worth it. Not the grade coming up. The fact that somebody's actually going to watch.
Meet the Author, Tom White
Tom White is the director of business development at Amitrace. Tom's role is to help educators build better programs through better training, planning, and equipment. Before joining Amitrace, Tom was the Broadcast Engineer at Grady College of Journalism and Communication at the University of Georgia. Prior to that role, Tom taught at Morgan County High School and Rockdale Career Academy where he and his student produced thousands of live streams for sports, news, and community events. Tom is a member of the SkillsUSA Georgia Board of Directors and also serves as a contest tech chair for SkillsUSA Alabama and Tennessee.
What does a marketing teacher in Gwinnett County know about broadcast education? More than you'd expect.
Tom sits down with Evan Rosenberry at Collins Hill High School — the first marketing teacher in Teaching to the Test Pattern history — and the conversation goes places. AI in the classroom, why banning it might be the worst thing you can do for your students, a student MLB franchise project that ended up in Seoul, Korea, and what happened when Evan handed his kids the VidPod and said "figure it out."