'To' for Tuesday

Welcome to 'To' for Tuesday-

Today (and all the other Tuesdays I can manage) will be a celebration of the letters we'd like to write if only people would read them, and take the well meaning, measured advice, to heart.

I mean, really, this is well thought out stuff!
-
To: The High School Staff
From: Your Yearbook Adviser

Welcome back to school!
It's going to be a GREAT YEAR! Forget all about last year, we have 180 days (well, a few less due to furlough days) to make things great! Let's commit TODAY to working together to make this years Yearbook, the 2011 Beige and Gray, the Best Book Ever!

Here are a few gentle reminders and guidelines for you to commit to memory and comply with. Our book is only as good as our content, and you and your students are part of our content, so we all share this responsibility!

Your classes:

1. If possible, please have interesting and engaging things happening during 4th period, the yearbook period. We frequently come into classes and the students are working away on some educational activity- BORING. We need excitement! We need color!
2. FIRE is always a big hit. Foods and Chemistry classes have an advantage here, but there is no reason to not include flames/fire into a math lesson, English essay, etc. Be creative, people. Flaming jump-ropes in PE? Flambe' in French II? That's the spirit!
3. Attractive students make for better images. Of course we all love all the students equally, but really, there are beauty winners and beauty losers. If possible, cluster the pretty students toward the front (a wide aperture will blur the less fortunate to a homey, homely, less shocking background)
4. Candids are gold! But, let's not get crazy here. Candids can look a little, well, disgusting. Unkempt hair, authentic facial expressions, unblended eye-shadow: these may be great on National Geographic television, but not for OUR book. Remember, we have no idea which classes we will pop in to, which would make it almost impossible to prepare. So, this year, we will send out a yearbook staffer (a drone; or in the vernacular, a 'freshman') 10 minutes before we 'pop' in unannounced. Take the time to spruce up yourself and your students (not YOU, Mr. Suave, you're always a dream). Check hair, teeth, blemishes, birth-defects, unattractive health-care equipment. This is a team effort, after all.

Clubs

1. Please have all of your students present every meeting. It's SO frustrating to swing by to that one meeting, on that one day, and have the club president absent for some emergency surgery. Encourage your students to stop thinking just of themselves, and think more about the yearbook. After all, which will look better in 20 years? You see my point.
2. For 2011, we are 'switching it up' a little. Festive, attractive clubs have earned a double page spread each. Time management is difficult; taking the extra time to get highlights and extensions, making the extra effort for killer abs and perky pecs, suffering perpetual teeth whitening for that dazzling smile needs to be rewarded. Therefore, all clubs that just sit around raising money for the poor, the unfortunate, the ill and the unpopular will be moved to the index.
3. Uniforms, Club T-shirts and spirit wear must be approved through our Director of Visuals and Apparel. Let's not repeat last year's "plaid-tastrophe"- you know who I'm talking about, Junior Statesmen.

Sports

1. Maybe we'll go to playoffs, maybe not. But we can still LOOK like champs! Twenty years from now, no one will remember if we won, or lost, or were disqualified for breaking antiquated pharmacology rules. Encourage your students to attend, and cheer, for every level, every sport and every game. Striking photos include tears, shrieks, conniptions and fits. A few high-caffeine and sugar 'energy' drinks might help.
2. Injuries are tragic, but visually stunning! Remember the compound fracture on the football field in 2008? Moments like that don't happen by accident. Coaches are encouraged to remove spikes from cleats, oil the gym floor for basketball and volleyball, raise those hurdles just a few millimeters higher than standard, etc. These kids are surprisingly resilient. What means more, a moment of bone-crushing, career-ending agony or being immortalized in the yearbook? Thought so.
3. The cheerleaders are a surprising problem. They are just too attractive (well, almost all of them). In a nod to our multi-culturalism, I have asked the cheer coach to clad the girls in burkas. It adds a hint of mystery, and sets the bar so much lower for the dance team, the hip-hop team, and the female members of the faculty.
4. The scoreboard operator has agreed to reset the boards at the end of each game to a winning score. Please have all the athletes who are still ambulatory cluster under the board, thumbs up, for the last shot of the game.

Faculty Portraits

1. Contrary to the rumors, we WILL be taking the faculty portraits. However, we won't be using them. Each teacher's portrait will be substituted with the image of a soap-opera actor or actress from an obscure country (Guatemala, Ukraine, Canada, Asia, Montana). PE teachers can substitute players from the WNBA or National Soccer Leagues.

Deadlines

1. This year, we hope to sweep the awards categories (see below). To accomplish this, we need to submit the book a little earlier to ensure high quality printing in the 3-D sections, adequate time to embed the Alma Mater song-microchip into the cover, and retouch all the unfortunate photos. So, we must submit the final of the book by the second week of school to Herf-walwOr-joST-TayLor (AKA HOSTL). Thus:
2. Week 1: Homecoming, Senior Ball, Fall and Winter Sports, Food Faire
3. Week 2: Spring Sports, Talent Show, Blood Drives I, II and III, Candids, Prom, Graduation

Distribution

1. Never to early to start planning! Students who have purchased a book will be corralled in the gym. When I shoot the starter's pistol, all students will then run to the cafeteria to claim their book. To save money, we will only print half of the number of books ordered.
2. Students who still have fines or fees, or unserved detentions, or parking violations, or unreturned textbooks, or costs at the cafeteria, or a dirty locker, or once parked over the line in the parking lot, or did not return a borrowed pencil, will have their yearbooks remotely detonated. This obliterates both the book and the problem.

Awards

Everyone likes to win; we strive to dominate. The yearbook is only as good as a far-away, obscure panel of judges decides it is.

Our favored categories for this year's ImplantedDefibrilator contest? Glad you asked!

1. Most Text on a Page
2. Still More Text on a Page
3. My Goodness Thats a Lot of Text on Only One Page
4. One Really Big Picture with Overprinted Text
5. Photoshop Filter Faux-Pas
6. Non-Sequitor Captioning
7. Putting the Ew in Lewd
8. Murky Lurkers in The Background
9. Popular With The Judges But Sold At A Loss
10. Typo Hawl of Faem
11. Giddy Grids & OCD Layouts: The Straight and Narrow
12. I Didn't Know Photos Came in Those Shapes
13. Every Font, Every Page, Every Time
14. Don't Rain on My Clip Art Parade
15. Obscure Club/Sports Coverage
16. Photoshopped to Phabulous
17. I Can See Your Wingding
18. Unflattering Angle/Lighting
19. Senior Superlatives Slander-Palooza
20. Whoops- Were You Eating?
21. Wrestling Pictures That Don't Make Us Feel Awkward
22. It's a Trend If We say It Is
23. Wait! Deadline was Today? (Procrastination-Nation)
24. Nightmare On Tenure Street: What Prior Review Didn't Catch
25. When Stock Covers are Good Enough for Us
26. Whatever: Freshmen Coverage
27. Lighten Up: The Kids Who Wear Black All Day Every Day

Thanks for reading to the end!

Remember, without you, the yearbook would just be a well-run, very organized collection of signature pages with a sprinkling of internet photos and an inaccurate index.