Before I get to the business at hand, the one bedroom apartment right next door is vacant and will be available by the end of the month. It's on the third floor of an awesome building. I have a great landlord who gave me candy for Christmas and I can walk to Larchmont. Plus, there's actually plenty of available parking on the street and one space in the garage. I love my apartment.
So if any of you cats are looking for a place to live email me. I want somebody cool living next door. It would be awesome if it was a writer because if I have an idea I could just yell over to your balcony and we could brainstorm. Also, when my cat climbs over there to see what you're up to it wouldn't freak you out as much as it did the old neighbors when they woke up to find a strange cat sitting in their living room.
I think there's also a two bedroom vacant somewhere in the building.
Now. Yesterday I had to deal out a major conflict resolution in Yearbook. The main group of senior girls have spent months working on a book that follows a pop art theme. The book is full of bright colors and wacky pages and it looks really really cool. It's the most creative book I've yet been a part of and everybody was working and things were going well.
So the new semester began and I got three new students who don't like the pop art theme. And yesterday they decided to tell everybody what they thought. "I think we need to be more traditional," they said. "I don't think this looks very good."
1) It's not finished yet. Nothing looks good until it's finished but you have to look at the potential.
2) You just got here. Shut your pie hole until you know what you're talking about.
3) Our school is three years old and filled with immigrants and the children of immigrants and we're constantly in the news for our crazy behavior. We ain't some 50-year-old private school in a rich, white neighborhood. The traditional theme doesn't fit who we are.
4) We have one month left to finish this book we've been working on since July and you want to change the entire thing?
So I sat the whole class down yesterday and we had a big discussion. I thought we were going to have a major cat fight. "We don't want to change all of it," one girl said, "Just the senior section. We think it should be burgundy because that's our class color." (They decided on their class color three weeks ago.)
Yes. Andy Warhol often worked in burgundy.
So the girl who thinks she knows everything about art wants to take 30 pages of the book and make it burgundy while making the rest of the book bright pink and green. Yeah that will look awesome.
So I had to spend class yesterday holding back the girls who've been working on this idea all year while still pretending I respected the ideas of the new kids as I told them there was no way in hell we're making the changes they want. In the end we compromised. We'll make the seniors wear burgundy shirts in the senior class photo and the new kids will shut up and trust me and their fellow yearbook staff members.
I bet you never thought yearbook was this complicated or important to some people. Oh yes it is. I can't tell you how many shouting matches I've had over yearbooks in the past five years. I once had such a loud argument with the ROTC guy that the teacher next door had to come over and ask us to quiet down. He wanted to design the ROTC page himself and I told him that would not happen until he let me teach his class how to march.
When the yearbook came out he sent me a thank you / apology card.
If I can handle a 50-year-old soldier who has killed people in the Iraqi desert I think I can handle three know-it-all teenage girls.
In the future everyone will be Yearbook chairman for fifteen minutes.
ReplyDelete.
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Burgundy B
first of all, I WISH I could move in there now. Save it for me for next summer, will ya?
ReplyDeleteSecond, I hate yearbooks and refuse to look back at them.
People need to cool it with the yearbook stress. Nobody looks good in high school.
hey...stumbled upon ur blog thru anothers...newaz nice post...likd being here..cya arnd
ReplyDeletecheers!!
Just Me, I'll talk to my landlord. Maybe he can just leave the place open for parties until you get here.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the reasons people hate the yearbook at their school is because it featured the same popular kids on every page. That's why I hated mine.
That's why I work really hard every year to make sure we represent as many kids as possible in the book.
I actually take the yearbook very seriously. It's essentially an art class and I have a $20,000 budget and the kids work really hard to put it together.
They do almost all the work so when it's done it's a true student production. Believe it or not but yearbook has changed a few lives. There have been some students who didn't give a damn about school until they signed up for yearbook, but after they joined the staff they started doing better in all their classes because they accomplished something for once and liked the way it felt.
Like most projects in school, yearbook tends to be seen as overly important by the few folks who care about yearbook and not important enough by those who do not.
ReplyDeleteIf only everyone was blessed with my precise indisputable Olympian understanding of all things.
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B
Oh if only we could all be more like you.
ReplyDeleteYearbook may not seem important to most people, but it's important to my kids and to the seniors it represents.
It is not more important than passing English class.
I actually had an editor one year who kept skipping AP English to work on yearbook. I started locking her out of the room so she'd go to class.
It's an extra curricular like any other. It's as important to the students in the class as football is to the players, but it produces a product you keep for life.
Most people still have their yearbooks when they're 80. What else do you have that you've kept that long?
That doesn't mean it's the most important thing in the world, but the kids deserve respect for working on it, not contempt.
Most people still have their yearbooks when they're 80. What else do you have that you've kept that long?
ReplyDeleteA bevy of emotional scars from my high school years.
My school yearbooks have followed me around for years. I've never looked at them. The Wife insists that we keep them for that mystical and as-yet-unseen day when suddenly I reverse course and start to give a rodent's backside for black and white memories of eighth grade PE and of sophomore year band.
Meh.
Take the canolis. Leave the yearbooks.
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B (who has twice been elementary school yearbook chairman in the past five years)
Then yearbooks aren't for you. Sorry your childhood was so sad.
ReplyDeleteMY students work very, very hard. High school year book is NOTHING like elementary school yearbook. Ours isn't a scrap book put together with glue sticks and mom's advice.
This book is designed using the latest software and with great artistic knowhow. Your book may have sucked. ours does not. We use the same care we would if we were designing a magazine, and several of my past students have gotten internships at magazines based on the skills they learned in yearbook.
I teach this class. I teach it well. And to suggest that the hard work my students and I put into it is useless because you had some bad experiences in high school is insulting.
I teach this class. I teach it well. And to suggest that the hard work my students and I put into it is useless because you had some bad experiences in high school is insulting.
ReplyDeleteI made no such suggestion, Emily.
You stated that yearbooks are one of the things people hold onto, and I made a half-joking response to that comment.
Meanwhile, I am absolutely certain that you do a fine job at teaching your class, and I've never said or suggested anything to indicate any other belief. You'd no doubt be thrilled to learn that the yearbooks I worked on were not "a scrap book put together with glue sticks and mom's advice," but were in fact designed on high end workstations using the most current versions of the same software I used when designing magazine and and layouts for commercial clients for sixteen years.
Continued success.
B
I take a lot of crap from people over yearbook. They think it's okay to insult it and me because it seems like something only popular kids are into.
ReplyDeletePeople talk about what a waste of time yearbook is to my face, as if I'm somehow going to agree with them even though I spend a great deal of my life working on it.
So I get defensive of it because I get tired of people thinking it's okay to crap all over the work my kids do.
Sorry if I over reacted.
Don't hate on yearbook.
When I first read this post, I thought you said the book follows a *pop tart* theme.
ReplyDeleteBet that would've united the old and new kids.
Nice. I can't imagine why the landlord would object to having a permanent party space in his building. :)
ReplyDeleteI really like Larchmont, it seems like it would be a cool neighborhood to live in. Sadly for many of us, I have a hunch the prices around there are a bit more than in surrounding neighborhoods like Koreatown.
how much is this apartment?
ReplyDeleteMy place is $1275. Email me if you want pictures or more info.
ReplyDeleteHello - found your blog though a random search.
ReplyDeleteI'm a first year yearbook teacher - and I've had my share of shouting matches! At the moment most of mine are in the form of "that's now how we did it last year!!" (and last year's book was full of !!!!!! and color boxes in only the school colors and very little writing - so thank goodness we're not doing it like last year's!)