That first morning, we looked at each other like animals and visitors at the zoo, though I'm not sure who played which role. About 2 p.m., the city editor, Eddie Robinette, who would become my mentor over the next six weeks, came to me with a tip. It was a local angle on the bombing in Saudi Arabia.

"It could be a helluva story," he said as he walked away, a phrase I would hear repeatedly over the next six weeks.

A Sarasota woman had spent hours the previous night worrying about the fate of her son in Dhahran. A State Department call indicated that he was missing. Early in the morning after the bombing, he called. He was all right. The story was a happy one, unlike 19 similar ones. She said that a day before the blast she had sent her son his favorite cookies and worried, as always, that the chocolate chips might melt.

For a lead I wrote: "On Monday, Barbara Lagos worried that the chocolate chips might melt in the cookies she mailed to her son in Saudi Arabia.

"On Tuesday, she feared he might not be alive to eat them."

The story ran on page one. And with that story, I was welcomed into the fraternity. I could report. I could write. Herald-Tribune reporters learned that much about me, and more importantly, 10 years after my first reporting job, I had relearned it about myself.

That was what the Institute for Journalism Excellence was about. It was a learning experience for both sides. We learned how hard reporters and editors worked. How conscientiously they approach the "calling" of journalism.

I hope journalists who worked with us learned that we care about staying current in the profession. That we, too, work hard, even though our academic calendar looks deceptively leisurely. That we love journalism too, but have chosen to teach it rather than to practice it.

Soon after that first story that I was cultivating ideas of my own. The paper routinely allowed 40 or more inches for my stories on topics such as the inexact science of polling, the big business of marine mammal rescuing, the neglect of the city's historically black cemeteries, and a new generation of flight data recorder now available but hung up because of bureaucratic wrangling.

With every story, I learned. I kept a copy of every draft to chart the improvement of the story as it moved under Eddie's eye and across the copy desk. I now use comparisons between those drafts and the finished stories to show students how a good story is a synergistic effort between editors and reporters.

This semester, many of the stories I use, in both positive and negative illustrations, are mine. The anecdotes I tell are mine. For me, those six weeks in Sarasota were exactly the refresher course they were intended to be.

While taking something away from the Herald-Tribune, I hope I also left something behind - the impression that professors teach, not because we can't cut it in the real world, but because we want to help our students learn to survive there.

At the end of my stay, Eddie took me out to lunch. "You're a helluva writer," he said. "If any high school kid asks me where to go to college to learn journalism, I'm sending them to learn under you."

"You send me an 18-year-old to teach, and I'll send you back a 22-year-old to hire," I replied.

"It's a deal," he said.

Patterson, a professor at Oklahoma Christian University in Oklahoma City, was attached to the Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune.