Karen asks, “What will your kids do without an annual yearbook? Even elementary schools have them nowadays.”
Elementary schools offer them. I do not buy them. Twice-yearly pictures were enough. I barely gave enough of a flip about the other kids in Captain Science’s class to buy the class picture. I certainly did not ever give enough of a flip about the other kids in the entire school to buy a yearbook. I am not a cash cow and do not appreciate being milked by anyone other than my nursing baby.
Really, when is the last time you opened up your yearbooks? How much meaning do they really have to you in adulthood? I think I look at mine every few years, mainly when I need a reminder of how much I hated high school and 99.97% of the people in my graduating class. Yearbooks are a $50 way of remembering a time period that I actually wish I could effectively block from my memory. High school days were not my glory days. I don’t look on them fondly. I don’t wax poetical while poring over black and white pictures of people who mostly grew up to be the kind of people I add on Facebook and summarily delete, because they are just that insufferable. You will not see me weeping over a lack of a yearbook.
Should my children express a longing for something of this nature, I’ll gather together all of their homeschooled friends. We’ll do photoshoots, get photobooks printed, and they can all sign each other’s photobooks. They’ll be classier, less expensive, and full of only the people they liked and want to remember, rather than the overpriced remembrance of people he barely knew, didn’t particularly like, and won’t bother to keep in contact with after graduation.
And that is what a [Smrt] Homeschooler has to say about yearbooks.
Do you have a question for the [Smrt] Homeschooler? Email them to
smrtmama@smrtlernins.com
Our home school group does a year book but I’ve never bought it.
My high school year book contained all the students in the school from K-12th grade (all one hundred of us). Yeah, not a priority around here.
Haa, haa. This killed me though. “I don’t wax poetical while poring over black and white pictures of people who mostly grew up to be the kind of people I add on Facebook and summarily delete, because they are just that insufferable.” LOL. I feel that way about college friends. It is like they are stuck in 1990.
Actually, I am really happy I have mine. I have one from 8th grade, though, that I didn’t like my picture at the time so I took a sharpie to it. I regret that so much.
How was high school for you in general? A happy or unhappy time? I’m sure my ambivalence toward yearbooks stems from my overall negative experience in school. Academically, I did well, but socially, I was very unhappy.
Our yearbooks were included with tuition (though I never knew elementary schools did yearbooks!), so everyone had one. I don’t know what it would be like to have some people not having them. Huh.
Oh, so, I had this nutty idea, which isn’t really about yearbooks but instead graduations. I’m going to make Gillian play her own graduation music. She can play “Pomp and Circumstance” on the piano & record it, on the trumpet & record it, and if she play another instrument, on it too, record it, and then she can mix them, and we’ll play it. Hee. I’m nuts.
That is truly scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as objections to home schooling go.
And they charge money for a yearbook? I thought they were just given to all the kids free. You could produce something similar with some other home educating families and still have enough change to buy a present for your child.
Every year that J was in public school, I’d skip the 2nd round of “annual” pictures. And, every year, they’d take his picture anyway AND SEND HIM HOME WITH PRINTS and a letter asking me to send a check or return the prints. What a disgusting ploy! But yeah, I did return them, basically telling my darling child I didn’t want another shot of his mug.
We also declined elementary school yearbooks. Yes, I’ve put the savings in the therapy account.
I a year book every year, even in elementary school. My grandma bought most of them. I wanted something fun to catalog the year, so I’m going to create a scrapbook. I figure I wanted to try scrapbooking anyway, and if it doesn’t work out I’ll just do a photo book next year. I also think I’ll include some photos from over the summer too in it. It will also just be a place for me stuff her Kumon certificates and some of her art work. I like this idea better than a year book though, it’s all about the kid I really care about and some of her friends. Seems pretty awesome to me.
I think i threw my yearbooks away—all of them, and I’m a sucker for sentimentality. I still can’t believe I tossed them. But what clutter. However, before we moved overseas a couple of years ago, I did buy my daughters each a yearbook from their former private school because the school was so small the book was more like a family photo album. And before we began homeschooling while overseas last year I also bought them each a yearbook from the international school they had attended because I knew that they would want to remember that experience. Still, I loathed that int’l school. The bad administration and bad teaching helped push us to finally take the homeschooling leap.
Ha! That last sentence of your first paragraph sent my ginger ale slightly into my sinus. Not sure why I would thank you for that, but I just love a funny.
I sympathize 100%. Pictures of me (NEVER an actual happy smile) and my fellow inmates I was forced to tolerate for 13 years…do you think Angola offers yearbooks? As a matter of fact, I took out my yearbooks just last week and wanted to toss them. Oh look! Another picture of me, um smiling? Grimacing? I ended up saving them because my husband suggested the kids might like to laugh at them some day? Crazy.