Being a yearbook advisor has many consolations, and as long as you are conscientious, it is hard thing to screw up. Of course, there are headaches (as I've mentioned before, English teachers are not the first group you think of for natural businessmen), but in the big picture they are relatively minor.
Since, at the high school level, girls tend to be more conscientious students, and since,for some reason, it's mostly girls who seem interested in yearbook, one of my consolations is that I tend to get good core groups to work with. However, having an all-girl class can be tricky for me from time to time. One of the reasons is that conversations in the yearbook class are not bound by subject matter the way they are in normal classes. Seems anything goes, so long as it isn't completely lurid. And so, I have to be circumspect about which matters to offer "I'm-old-enough-to-be-your-father" opinions on, and which ones to pretend not to have heard at all. No matter how careful, though, there is a subject I seem to often accidentally step into which involves... er... female biological functions.
Usually it starts when I innocently ask one of the girls who looks deathly ill if they are o.k. So it began on Friday, after one girl came in class and immediately dropped her jacket and proceeded to lay out flat - incommunicado - on the cold, dirty, hard floor. Another girl, sitting at the computer near me, also let out a weary groan from time to time. Soon, in some telepathic manner, my editor has figured out and announced that four of them are , um, having the same experience on this day. As I checked yearbook pages, I heard snippets of conversations about the wonders of Midol, or about personal stories their mothers tell, etc. Can you say "sticking out like a sore thumb"?
Look, I've been married 11 years, and I helped the doctor and nurses bring my son into the world, so I'm no wallflower. But on days like Friday, I can't help but have that same icky feeling I had in fifth grade health class. And seventh grade health class. And ninth grade health class.
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FOR THE STRAIGHT WAY WAS LOST."
"Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school." - Jaques, As You Like It
(Oh yeah... the views expressed here are my own, and not necessarily those of my school or school district. Thought you would like to know.)
"...I came to myself in a dark wood,
FOR THE STRAIGHT WAY WAS LOST."
About Me
- School Master P
- North Carolina
- I'm a born and raised North Carolinian, and live in the east-central part of the state. My average, but deviously ambitious family includes my one lovely wife , my one darling son (8 yrs. old), and (most ambitious of all) a no-doubt mean little girl born in October (surprise, surprise!). I have completed seven years of teaching high school English. I spent my first five years of teaching at a small rural school, and am now teach at a much bigger school in a bedroom community several miles outside of Raleigh.
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2 comments:
This reminds me so much of my yearbook classroom.
Midol conversations, chit-chat about the dumb boyfriends, the urgings of a fellow classmate to give up on boys and find a nice girl to settle down with...
I almost felt a pang of sympathy for the yearbook advisor, until I remembered that he was also secretly dating the co-editor, who was a young senior, having skipped a grade. Ooops.
Please don't grade that last paragraph.
Whooaaa... that is some really ugly stuff there, JP. Sounds like the recipe for several disasters. How did the actual yearbook turn out (under such circumstances, you know, artiste's sometimes do their best work).
One reason I'm always circumspect about where I enter into conversations is that I am mortified of ever being considered a creepy old lecher. Important for all kinds of reasons (especially important not to actually be a lecher, btw), but one of them is because 90% of the yearbookers I work with are girls, and they have to feel comfortable in my presence.
We all know there are male teachers they don't feel comfortable around. Ick.
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