House of Eratosthenes

The problem is not with the cheerleaders, or with the sixteen-year-old (girl) student who put the insulting article in, but in grown-up-land. Some grown-ups think the yearbook is an exercise in free speech, is therefore sacred…in fact there is a Supreme Court decision, or law, or something saying the administrators have to let the students have the final word. Other grown-ups think the cheerleaders enjoy some equally sacrosanct right to flip open the yearbook and not be offended by anything they find in there. Many grown-ups, I’m gathering, believe both things and glide on through life blissfully unaware of the contradiction.

But there’s a contradiction. You can’t have both of those. It’s one or the other.

Me? I’m one of the rotten stinkers who doesn’t believe in either one. I think the admins have a right and an obligation to interfere if the content flouts some standard or other — and, when you open the yearbook you might find something that might not necessarily appeal to you, and that’s okay. Both these ideas of mine, I hasten to point out, reflect the world in which grown-ups live after they’ve grown up. So why we’re trying to impress on children that it’s not really that way, is something I’d need to have someone explain to me…doesn’t seem to me like anything that will help them down the road.

I’ll go along with this, though. It’s rotten to put in something insulting about identified individuals right before graduation — no rebuttal possible, no recourse available if the writer & editor happen to be seniors. Maybe that’s the best way to handle it: The yearbook content, cover to cover or most of it, is decided by graduating freshmen. So the image-conscious sophomores and juniors have an incentive not to be complete dicks to the freshmen, and the freshmen have an incentive to save that “done with school, answer to no one, rebel without a clue” nonsense for three years down the road.

Granted, that does not address the problem here quite so much…but, like I sad, that’s alright. I’m not sure it has to be addressed. Imagine such a snotty article is written about you and your fellow cheerleaders, now add ten or twenty years. Is it a problem? Really? No, it’s funny. Admit it, it’s a minor footnote at best.

This one needs an attitude adjustment:

“Ugh! I was really mad. I was shaking,” said cheerleader Breannah Gully after picking up her yearbook. “And I started reading, and everyone had to tell me to calm down and I was just angry at the words, and I called my mom and I was crying.”

So that’s another litmus test I have: If you describe the problem to me, and I end up more worried about your upbringing than about the problem itself, then that’s a fail. This girl seems to think performing before an audience has something to do with controlling the reaction the audience is supposed to have, right down to each individual within…and that’s a much bigger problem than the yearbook.

Yeah, you’re right. Your High School Yearbook is not the place for “free speech”, as in “say whatever you want about anyone.”

It’s an official school document, as far as I’m concerned, and there is a monopoly on production to boot.

On the other hand, it does give a nice excuse to put female news reporters in cheerleader outfits for the 6:00 news, and I’m all for that 😉
- philmon | 06/01/2011 @ 10:44
Mm hmm. This would have been plenty bad enough if it had simply appeared in some edition of the student newspaper, something which is read by the whole campus one week…and the next lying around on the floor of the bathrooms and locker areas with the wadded up paper towels and potato chip bags.

The yearbook is supposed to be one of the vehicles by which students remember a particular year out of the four-year high school experience. You can give a brief synopsis of what the activity clubs did that year, how the school sports teams performed (pictures and names of those involved is mandatory). You can give brief biological sketches of the school faculty, you can include blank pages for signatures and farewell messages.

What you don’t do is include some mean-spirited article about the school’s pep squad, no matter how richly deserved. Nobody should be opening this book thirty years from now and reading that. It’s not what yearbooks are for. They’re to accentuate the positive and downplay the negative…not even pretending to give a balanced or objective view according to someone’s standard. The entire point is for it to be read decades in the future and used to romanticize the years of one’s lost youth….right?

And calling the cheer outfits “glorified underwear?” Uh…they wear those little shorts under the skirts to start with…so you don’t see anything you shouldn’t while the young ladies are doing pyramids and bouncing around at football games.

Yeah, the long-haired high school girl comes out sounding like a ditz and an overly-emotional one at that, but….guys? SHE’S A TEENAGE GIRL. Isn’t that, like, totally, how they like, talk and stuff? OMG! LOL!
- cylarz | 06/02/2011 @ 00:26

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Yearbook ScandalWednesday, June 1st, 2011

Yearbook Scandal
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011