I was the editor of my high school yearbook, so naturally a story like this catches my eye:
Queen Creek Unified School District officials are reviewing policies and guidelines regarding student publications after several parents complained about the high school yearbook earlier this month.
The Queen Creek High School yearbook shows pictures of a lesbian couple, students with tattoos and piercings, and teens named "best partiers" holding red plastic cups. Parents have called the school and attended a district school board meeting to complain about the images, which they say are age inappropriate.
I presume the parents know there are lesbian couples, tatooed students and partiers in their children's high school. So the question is whether the yearbook should reflect reality. Not in my day -- the purpose of a yearbook was to create a stylized, romantic version of the high school experience so we could look back years later and tell ourselves lies about what a wonderful time we had.
Comments
You mean lies about the wonderful time 2 or 3 people had...
Leo...
Last year I attended the 50th anniversary of the "Class of '57" (and yes, you know know how old I am). The 100 attendees, the frail and the hearty alike, had no interest in remembering the bad times.
Interestingly, not a single copy of the "57 Yearbook" was there. The class picture was centrally displayed and we all spent time in front of it trying to remember names, which were not displayed on the composite. We talked about the 33 classmates who had passed and we vowed to get together again this year to remember more of the good times.
Yearbooks are like buried time capsules to be opened at a later date. Maybe this year we will open the yearbook.
As the Statlers sang:
And the class of '57 had its dreams,
But living life day to day is never like it seems.
Things get complicated when you get past eighteen,
But the class of '57 had its dreams.