From time to time we feature Balfour advisers and schools. In this guest post, Klein Forest High School adviser Sue Blackmon offers advice for big schools with small books. This is her 40th year advising and teaching.
The first rule I teach young writers is “don’t begin the story with a question,” but how do you get 3,700 kids, 350-plus faculty and staff, 70 clubs, 30 sports teams and everything else in 200 pages?
Let’s just shatter another writing rule and add a cliché to this article—“good things come in small packages.” With that in mind, let’s talk about packages or modules.
Think large, and then shrink—kind of like Shrinky Dinks. Do you remember the plastic sheets you “Color, Bake & Shrink”? The box promises your creations “shrink to one third of the original size” and become “9 times thicker.”
Think smaller and denser. Just because your book has fewer pages, doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice content. Instead think outside the box, or inside the module, and include everything in multiple secondary coverage packages on spreads. Cover the essentials, plus a little bit more.
While you may not have a traditional feature story on every spread, you can use storytelling quotes and expanded captions to offer the reader the complete story. It’s just done with an alternative approach. Besides, who doesn’t like a good infograph, detailed list or photo collection?
Ultimately, when you have a big school and a small book, you need to take a sea turtle’s advice:
- Swim with the current. Cover important events and people at your school. Make the coverage specific to the year.
- Be a good navigator. Plan, but always, always have a plan B (and C and D).
- Stay calm under pressure. Deadlines can be stressful. Combine clear expectations with frequent fun.
- Spend time at the beach. Make your staff room a happy place for both you and the kiddos. On the home front, you may need to take a cruise when school’s out, or at Thanksgiving or Christmas or, well, anytime, except maybe deadline time.
- Be well traveled. Have staff members explore students’ lives both inside and outside the building. Have them look at everything with fresh eyes as if they were seeing it for the first time.
- Think long term. This is a natural for yearbookers because yearbooks are for life.
Sea turtles manage to age more gracefully than most mammals. Advising may give us gray hair and add a few more pounds, but it keeps our spirits young. When you need advice, don’t hesitate to seek out experienced advisers who can be found on beaches everywhere.