Wednesday, June 02, 2004
Yearbooks
One of my many roles at work is being the instructor of the annual/journalism class. I work with high school kids to create the yearbook and this is my third year doing it. Mind you, I have no training in journalism whatsoever and had never had anything to do with creating a yearbook when I took the job.
The day before school started three years ago my principal called me and the other new teacher in the school to his office. He said, "one of you needs to do the yearbook class. Who's it going to be"? We both stammered and shuffled and looked at our feet. My colleague has a college degree in English but was a first year teacher and limited computer ability. I was a veteran teacher and administrator with good computer skills. The next day he called me in and said, "you're the guy. Neither of you know what you're doing but you have the experience with kids and the computer skills to get through it". With that, I became the yearbook guy. After six months of work the books came in from the publisher, and yesterday I began passing them out to students.
Its fun to watch kids leafing through the book, commenting on pictures, and asking each other to sign. I probably signed 15 yearbooks today and will do many more in the coming days.
I still have my high school yearbook and its fun to look back on those days. I was skinny as a rail, had a head full of floppy hair, was a little shy, loved sports, had crushes on girls, and parked a 1966 baby blue Dodge pickup in the school parking lot each day. The yearbook immortalizes that time.
Hopefully these kids will be able to look back on their high school years with the same fondness that I still do. The man I am today wandered those hallways with limitless possibilities for the future. Now I'm a middle aged guy who has made my way in the world with brilliant successes and some devastating mistakes.
I wish I could infuse what I've learned over the past 25 years into the heads of these kids. But of course at that age I wouldn't have listened to a guy like me.
Here I am working with the yearbook class:
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The day before school started three years ago my principal called me and the other new teacher in the school to his office. He said, "one of you needs to do the yearbook class. Who's it going to be"? We both stammered and shuffled and looked at our feet. My colleague has a college degree in English but was a first year teacher and limited computer ability. I was a veteran teacher and administrator with good computer skills. The next day he called me in and said, "you're the guy. Neither of you know what you're doing but you have the experience with kids and the computer skills to get through it". With that, I became the yearbook guy. After six months of work the books came in from the publisher, and yesterday I began passing them out to students.
Its fun to watch kids leafing through the book, commenting on pictures, and asking each other to sign. I probably signed 15 yearbooks today and will do many more in the coming days.
I still have my high school yearbook and its fun to look back on those days. I was skinny as a rail, had a head full of floppy hair, was a little shy, loved sports, had crushes on girls, and parked a 1966 baby blue Dodge pickup in the school parking lot each day. The yearbook immortalizes that time.
Hopefully these kids will be able to look back on their high school years with the same fondness that I still do. The man I am today wandered those hallways with limitless possibilities for the future. Now I'm a middle aged guy who has made my way in the world with brilliant successes and some devastating mistakes.
I wish I could infuse what I've learned over the past 25 years into the heads of these kids. But of course at that age I wouldn't have listened to a guy like me.
Here I am working with the yearbook class:
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Yahoo ID - okieyetagain
