I, however, hated writing and had always hated it—the year before, in my ELP class, my refusal to take notes was so strong that my teacher would write in my notebook for me. When we wrote personal narratives in my  fifth grade classroom, I couldn't put emotion in my words and I couldn't put words on the paper. I hated writing so much that instead of writing a story in first grade (baby's first writing assignment), I create​d a color guessing game in my notebook. Arts and crafts, to me, won out over made-up fantasies.

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But something about Fifthcris Weekly was different than my previous encounters with writing. It might have been that Katiya and Estelle were canonizing my fifth grade experiences; it might have been that everyone wanted a copy of Fifthcris Weekly; it was probably because I was jealous that my best friends had something I did not and refused to let me join. 

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Fifthcris continued for the rest of the year. I wrote an occasional story in the "Community Page" (The Dog Across the Street, in which a man gets hit by a car, dies, and his dog is adopted by the neighbor across the street), but I never wrote a news article that made it past the Fifthcris  publisher's desk and to the printing press.

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Sixth grade I was place​​d in a different class. To anyone else, that meant they were sad LEK Corporated (Lily, Estelle, Katiya) was separated; to me, it meant the chance to create a rival newspaper. Gone were the days of Fifthcris Weekly, of course—you can't call your newspaper Fifthcris if you're not in fifth grade and your teacher isn't Mr. Criswell, and anyway, it had slowly devolved into Fifthcris Monthly over the last few months—but Miller Monthly, named after their sixth grade teacher, was the new big-name newspaper created by notorious media moguls Katiya and Estelle.

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But small-town local paper The Sixth Grade Newsletter was on the rise. Not only did we release a special "Emoji Edition" for the fourth issue, but we were also able to secure an exclusive interview with popular sixth grade teacher Matthew Huber and featured a serial story with installments each issue. Also games. We had games, which everyone knows is the only reason newspapers are still in business.

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If Fifthcris Weekly and Miller Monthly were elite, gatekept publications, The Sixth Grade Newsletter was the opposite. I wanted anyone and everyone to be involved—I recruited as many students as I could from our small, 14-person class to contribute to the Newsletter.

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And, as it turns out, the underdog always wins. 

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Seventh grade: unremarkable. I was online due to the pandemic, which was just fine by me. I am historically lazy and was happy to sit at home, but I did write a weekly newsletter for a club I was in. I still enjoyed it when other people read the words I wrote, but all thoughts of The Sixth Grade Newsletter, Fifthcris Weekly, and Miller Monthly had vanished from my mind. 

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A year later, however, I was back at school in person, fresh out of isolation and also fresh out of social skills, which had seemed to disappear completely within the last year. Southeast Junior High didn't have a newspaper, which I was simultaneously shocked at and thankful for. No newspaper meant that I could create my own—as long as Katiya and Estelle didn't start it first.

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And so, The Hawk's Eye View was born. My first article was also a foreshadow of where my student journalism career was headed—I wrote about student opinions on the then-new Iowa law requiring the Pledge of Allegiance to be recited in schools (the full article is below). If The Sixth Grade Newsletter was a successful anarchist publication, lacking real management ​​​​​​in order to criticize the leadership of our rival paper, The Hawk's Eye View was led by a group of iron-fisted girls with strict made-up deadlines.

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Curiously, The Hawk's Eye View wasn't enough for me. I needed more, if only to prove that I could achieve more success than Miller Monthly had. So I signed up for Foundations of Journalism my freshman year.

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Three years after walking into the newsroom for the first time and almost seven since Fifthcris Weekly was first created, I am the sole executive editor of The Little Hawk. Somewhere along the way, I learned to enjoy writing; somewhere, I learned to revel in process of unraveling a story;  but I never forgot the real reason I became a journalist: because I am the most petty person alive, and in fifth grade, my best friends created a newspaper without me.

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I guess the question you're probably asking is "where are Katiya and Estelle now?" They're doing fine. They might not be the successful CEOs of a massive newspaper conglomerate they once were, but they also didn't need to start from the bottom to get to the top—they were already there. I can win as many awards as possible and lead an entire team of 50+ people by myself, but I will never beat the success of Fifthcris Weekly.

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