This photo makes me happy. The expression on Kazu’s face as he ends his junior year of journalism is, to me, concrete evidence that dreams do come true.

It’s been five school years since I took a chance and requested to start a digital journalism program at Foothill. Five years of constantly wondering “what the heck to do next” as a technology revolution turned publishing and the newspaper business I grew up with inside out. I made a ton of mistakes, had to backtrack and reinvent and build an audience over and over. I discovered that while I’m pretty good at the vision and inspiration thing, I’m not that great with logistics and systems building.

I learned I can push too hard in some areas and not hard enough in others. I can be detailed but lose the big picture, and then just as quickly gain the big picture and lose the details. I can be impatient and, ugh, overly competitive and randomly intense (not great attributes for a teacher). It has been a humbling experience, similar to raising a child, where it’s easy — and often wrong — to connect the gifts and flaws of the kid to your own efforts or mistakes.

Above all, though, I always dreamed of building a program for kids to own every year. Something that didn’t exist before. A program they didn’t know they belonged to until they stumbled into it. A place they would sincerely miss when they left. A place they couldn’t necessarily go back to, but would always remember. I hoped it would eventually have its own particular traditions, inside jokes, “institutional memory,” nicknames and humor. I thought these things would be a mark of its viability, and I quietly celebrated every tiny bit of evidence that this might be happening. — Nickname the journalism office “The Tardis?” Yay!!! … What’s a tardis? Who cares! … wait, is it school appropriate? — I hoped the program would challenge kids in the best way, by building character, and that it would give them chances to make dear friends and to find themselves in the uncertain time of adolescence. I hoped and dreamed — but didn’t know — if I could pull it off. These kinds of things happened to other teachers, not me.

I didn’t realize until one of my students posted this photo yesterday on FB that the word “program” could be synonymous with “family” and that it was actually a “school family” I was hoping to create all along. The pictures stapled to the wall of the journalism office are three years of memories. They were a Monday-night surprise from the seniors who graduate tomorrow, along with a hand-written, prominently posted note to future classes to go out and make their own memories. They take my breath away. They are worth more to me than any trophy, plaque or certificate of achievement. Everything is worth it, because five years ago the walls of this office were empty. Now there are stories.