Yearbook is an old-school way to remember an old school
The day students receive their high school yearbook is like
Christmas in springtime. Watching the look on their faces as they
tear into the annual is worth all the work that my class put into
the 304-page publication.
Christmas in May happened this week at San Benito High
School.
Yearbook is an old-school way to remember an old school
The day students receive their high school yearbook is like Christmas in springtime. Watching the look on their faces as they tear into the annual is worth all the work that my class put into the 304-page publication.
Christmas in May happened this week at San Benito High School.
On Wednesday, yearbook students got their first glimpse of the book on which they had worked since August. They eagerly went page by page, looking for pictures of themselves and their friends and checking how the pages they created ended up looking.
Seniors not in my class also got their first glimpse at the book after school that day, while the rest of the students picked theirs up on Thursday and Friday.
In this electronic age, it is refreshing to see students taking their time to enjoy a good book, well, at least a book – even if they are more interested in the pictures than the stories.
I frequently see students huddling over cell phones at lunch and break on campus, sharing a laugh while checking out a text or a website or a video. But there’s something different about them huddling over a yearbook, smiling – or cringing – when they find their picture.
They are not scrolling or clicking or typing; they are absorbing.
Granted, they are absorbing the book because teenagers are self-absorbed. They like seeing pictures of themselves and their friends at a rally or a game or a dance or in class.
Unlike their electronic devices, which sit in the palm of their hands, students lay out the yearbook on a desk or table or on their lap while leafing through it. It’s a community experience as friends sit shoulder-to-shoulder and get wistful about the year that was.
The yearbook is particularly important for seniors, who are reminded that the past year has flown by and their four years of high school will soon be a memory, preserved not as a text or a YouTube video, but as pictures and words and autographs in an old-fashioned, printed book.
Many of them eschew books and magazines and newspapers in favor of the instant gratification and moving pictures associated with electronic communication on cell phones and computers and television.
Then the third week of May comes around and they realize that their friends can’t autograph a YouTube video or draw a picture on a cell phone, like they can in the back pages of their yearbook.
I still laugh on the rare occasions I look at my high school yearbooks, with messages like “To a guy I met in 5th block, stay cool and don’t have too much fun in the summer. KIT” (keep in touch).
Not a very deep message, but looking at the words a friend wrote a quarter-century ago brings back memories of the good old days. I’m not sure today’s seniors are going to save a text from their classmate until they are 41, but I bet they’ll save a message written in Sharpie in the back of the yearbook by that friend.
As cool as these teens think they are compared to their parents, they will look back on the 2010 yearbook when they are parents and wonder what they were thinking wearing those sagging jeans or that hair style. Their kids will laugh at how corny Mom and Dad look and Mom and Dad will say “We look dorky to you, but we were pretty stylish back then.”
I treasure the comments that my students write in the back of my yearbook, as it reminds me of the year or more that we spent together. Many try to be funny, some point out that I’m going to miss them more than they’re going to miss me, and some thank me for being “chill.”
The permanency of a high school yearbook: the glue of its bindings, the ink of its words and pictures and the strokes of a message signed in pen, make it an old-school memento that will last longer – and have more meaning – than any e-mail, post or tweet.
Adam Breen teaches yearbook and newspaper classes at San Benito High School and is a reporter for The Pinnacle. He is former editor of the Free Lance. E-mail him at [email protected] or check out his blog at http://thebreenblog.blogspot.com.
