His First Love - the Elementary Yearbook
By Jeanne Acton, Journalism Director | Thursday, June 09, 2011 8:31 AM
Jeanne Acton, Journalism Director
My 6-year-old son Charlie received his first yearbook last week.
And he won’t let it go.
He struts around the house pointing out friends and faculty to anyone who will stop and listen.
It’s his crowning achievement for kindergarten, and he didn’t even have anything to do with it.
The strange thing is, I have never talked to Charlie about yearbooks. He knows his mommy is some type of educator/teacher, and he knows that I write some. But that’s it. I’ve never told him that hundreds of yearbooks flow through my office each year. I’ve never told him how much I love yearbooks. I have never even told him that I helped a bit with his own yearbook.
But he’s connected to it, nevertheless.
Maybe even more so.
For the past few years, I’ve heard that yearbooks are dying. “They are on their way out,” one adviser said to me last year. She was promoting some sort of social network site. Another adviser told me DVDs were the only way to go now.
I am not so sure I agree.
I admit sales are down, but we are in a recession. Honestly, I even questioned whether I would buy Charlie’s $15 softback yearbook at the beginning of the year.
I relented. And I am glad I did.
He loves that book. He doesn’t care that there isn’t a dominant photo, captions, secondary coverage, copy and everything else that I want a yearbook to have.
It’s his memory of his year. He’s already spent hours looking through every page of the book and trying to read the nice comments his YMCA counselors wrote about him.
He couldn’t do that with a social media site, and he couldn’t do that with a DVD. Please don’t think I am anti-DVD or social media. I am not. I think those are great additions to a yearbook.
I just believe in the book.
I don’t think Charlie is that different from students across the state and nation, and that gives me hope and makes me smile.
I believe most students would love to have a yearbook in their hands. They just don’t know it yet.
Like so many things in life, I think that yearbook bug, the tradition, should start early.
Students who get yearbooks in elementary school will want them in middle school. Students in middle school who buy yearbooks will want them in high school.
Maybe it’s not that simple, but for my son, it is.