It’s that time of year—time to get class yearbook orders in. While students may be excited, I can tell you one parent in particular, Mrs Brown, is not. “Why should I care about school yearbooks.” she asked. “A year from now my kids won’t care about them.”
I was speechless for a moment. As a teacher I know that for students, the class yearbook is huge. It is a record of that special time period: of achievements, of relationships, of friendships, of growth. No student wants to miss out on owning a book. Years from now, they’ll laugh at their fashion sense or lack of it, at funny hairstyles and odd pairings. They’ll wonder how the nerd ended up being so successful while the jock ended up in prison. To make a short story short: students want yearbooks.
So why are parents so cynical?
And then, I focused on Mrs Brown’s second sentence. “A year from now, my kids won’t care about them.”
Oh, but they will. They will, if they have ready access to the old school yearbooks at all times. They will if they are easily accessible. They will if the yearbook is paperless and the yearbook online.
Perhaps it is time for me to tell Mrs Brown our school’s yearbook is not your traditional old yearbook. It’s completely digital. It’s SchoolFlicker, the paperless yearbook.
Memori –
School teacher, young parent, erstwhile student, and resident of the blogosphere.