It was a week that began with a full moon and ended with Friday the 13th. The week before, our school secretary joked that we all needed to prepare for a doozy of a week. Little did we know it would literally be the last week of traditional school. Sigh.

When we left school Friday, March 13, to embark on the unknown of COVID-19, I heard some of my seniors in the hall say,

“This could be our last day of senior year.”

And it was, at least in the normal sense of school. Since then, we’ve been living the virtual life.

It is all so bizarre.

That last day at school, our principal, in a school-wide assembly, told students and teachers to take everything home because no one would be allowed back in the building, and he concluded with a statement that we now remind ourselves of daily:

“Don’t make this about you. You can be disappointed, and I understand that, but this is not about you. It is about all of us and doing the right thing for everyone.”

My seniors understand those words, as does my daughter who is a senior at a different school, and they will all do the right thing. They have no choice really, but the sting and reality of those words have settled hard on these smart, creative, big-hearted, dream-carrying, fear-of missing-out, young adults.

Through their eyes and screens, their senior year of “last times” has become their senior year of “disappearing times,” for all proms, spring sports, and graduations are now officially, indefinitely postponed.

With all of this disappointment, uncertainty, and even anxiety at times, one thing is for sure!

The yearbook will not be postponed!

As an English and journalism teacher, our book delivers in late June, so we cover everything from August to May.

How will you cover prom when it has been canceled?

How will you cover spring sports when all seasons are canceled?

How will you cover graduation when no one knows when that will happen or how?

Well, when you’re teenager, high school literally, for better or worse, consumes your life, so it is my duty as the yearbook adviser to go against my principal’s advice this once and make this book all about them!

So, after revamping my senior English classes for the rest of the semester, I called my technology director first thing Monday morning to ask for help in accessing our server of photos. Since he was an essential employee, he was allowed in the building.

This man spent his morning on Tuesday copying our entire 2020 Yearbook folder of pictures from the server to a huge external drive. Then, he delivered it to my home mailbox! It pays to always be nice and make friends, especially with the essential people!

On Tuesday morning, two days into our new virtual school world, I had a Zoom call with my three editors and shared my ideas with them and listened to theirs.

Together, we cut and combined some spreads and created a couple new ones. For example, baseball and softball now share a spread spotlighting each senior and their career in the sport, and we now have a COVID19 perspective spread.

After making the ladder right, we created two questionnaires in Google forms, one for all students grade 9-12 and one only for seniors:

Please help us complete the yearbook. Your responses and pictures are very important! Please answer these questions and email pictures to materdeijournalism@gmail.com with your name in the subject line.

I also sent an email to all spring coaches and cc’d the athletic director and principal:

Hello, everyone! I need your help, please. As my students and I continue to work on the yearbook, we are determined to keep spring sports pages in the book.

 

However, we will be covering the sports differently. We want to spotlight seniors and their “career” in the sport, complete with quotes and pictures. We also thought we could get quotes from potential freshmen who have longed to play for MD but won’t be able to this year.

 

What I need from each of you as soon as possible is the following:

1. Names of seniors who would be playing this season

2. Name of a freshman who had hoped to tryout for the team

3. Your answer to at least one of these questions:

• As a spring coach, what advice do you have for the young athlete who may not get to play this season?
• As a spring coach, what will you miss most about this season if your team doesn’t get to play?
• As a spring coach, what were you most looking forward to this season?

 

PLEASE take the time to respond to this email. Our yearbook is counting on your perspectives as coaches 

My design editor began creating a couple new templates that basically had no copy block and no main dominant in the traditional sense, and I set up weekly zooms with the entire staff. We also created a shared document for each staff member to record their to-do lists and items accomplished.

In our GroupMe app, students post when they need help or when they have checked a spread or if they need something from me.

By the end of the week, I requested via email to all faculty and staff and students to send in pictures of their new normal–from teaching and learning to exercising and connecting with family.

To date, we have people responding to our questionnaires and sending in pictures, and I have plans for this third week of virtual life to post a picture challenge to all our school’s social media platforms. Each day, I will ask for pictures of students’ and teachers’ new normal and their perspectives on living life this way.

Our plan may not be perfect and we may not receive everything we envision, and our spring spreads won’t quite look like the other seasons in the book, but we will not give up on telling our school family’s story.

We create the history book for our school, and COVID19 will not rob our #MaterDeiFamily of our stories–even if those stories are under quarantine and told through texts, snaps, zooms, and Google forms.

Keep your focus, everyone! Be smart, healthy, safe, and grateful every day, and don’t forget:

We each have the power to change the world for the better. . . one story at a time. Peace.