The shelf in my classroom holds 41 years of school history.

Yearbook advisers last an average of three years on the job, according to my first yearbook rep (who retired after we worked together for two books), a fair number of Reddit threads, and this Walsworth post. If anyone has done actual research on adviser lifespan — especially broken down between club and academic programs — I’d love to read it. Three years sounds about right. One year to learn what’s involved, a second year to try improvements, and a third year to acknowledge how impossible advising a yearbook is and find a way out

After clicking the final send on book number six, I suppose you could call me a veteran. It doesn’t feel that way. I’ve always believed that the more time you spend on learning a craft, the easier (or at least the more fluent) it becomes. This was true when I taught ceramics. My students always improved when they spent more hours on the potters’ wheel. I could always feel myself improving with clay, too, especially when I made enough time to reach a state of flow. The improvement does not feel steady with yearbook for a lot of reasons that I should write about someday, unless anyone has done the research, in which case, send it my way and I’ll add it to my summer reading list.

But I’ve stuck with it, and I’m still sticking with it, at least for another year. Book six taught my students and me a great deal. I’m trying to write some of it down before surrendering to the self-care and distraction of summer because I want to remember the lessons. I’m also going to let myself ramble. I’m out of practice with writing, and if I’m too critical of this screen of words — which tends to happen when some of my friends are capital-letter Writers, even when we write for different reasons —  I’ll never get these thoughts into the world. 

Some context. The yearbook program I advise is extracurricular. I teach photography and occasionally other art classes depending on enrollment demands. I receive a stipend that I split with another teacher — the school’s librarian — who helps with advertising, school photo logistics, co-chaperoning conventions, and proofing. I spend most of the stipend on snacks, contest entries, Wawa runs, and other team maintenance. 

Students are usually able to attend one evening club meeting weekly throughout the school year. Many of them join yearbook out of photography classes, so it makes sense that the students are most engaged in event photography, especially sports. They spend time outside of meetings taking photographs, and some develop strong identities as photographers. Many other yearbook programs rely on candid photography supplied by their school photo company, but we’ve relied on student photographers since I started advising in fall 2020. At the time, contracted photographers weren’t showing up due to the pandemic, so a student-produced photo library was essential. Now it’s just what we do.

Students learn the importance of caption writing and verbal storytelling at our meetings — but they seldom prioritize these essentials, and in a club-based program, there are few ways for me to hold them accountable. We do our best. I beg and bribe. I fix a lot of grammar and spelling errors. The students laugh at my ‘comma quote person said’ t-shirt — and then put the commas wherever they want.

Design is our biggest struggle. This spring, through a pilot course that wasn’t exactly a yearbook class but let me sneak some page design into the content, I learned that spread design was something students could learn and I could teach. It’s just not something that works in one club meeting a week. They need sustained practice, dedicated time, and feedback, which are all but impossible in a club. I’m stubborn about the quality of the final product, so I do my best to make sure the design is solid. But it could be a lot stronger with more student engagement. 

So, what did we learn in the production of the 2026 book? Here are a few lessons, mostly told through anecdotes, that I want to remember.

Students proof the book on deadline day at a coffeeshop off campus. There were not enough outlets near our table for our needs.

Yearbook teaches us to notice stories. 

We publish a loosely chronological book — fall, winter, spring seasons. Before I started advising, the coverage consisted mostly of photos of schoolwide events and sports. Now our chronological pages generally include one dominant story and one or two smaller features. That means we have to cover anywhere from 15-40 ‘smaller’ stories each season, in addition to traditional coverage like the lacrosse season and the pep rally.

The lesson here is that the small stories really are anything but small. They just involve people whose stories might not otherwise be part of the book. The student who learned about inclusion through his first unified basketball game. The student who found stress relief through cuddling a puppy during fifth block. The student who bravely demonstrated congressional debate during lunch. The student who learned the value of volunteering by helping to collect canned goods. These stories often go untold in a school year. I’m proud that you’ll find many of these in our book’s pages. 

One afternoon during our final production week, I showed students my 1994 high school yearbook. I explained that my experiences in high school shaped who I am today in profound ways, and not just because I became a high school teacher. Yet I barely remember any of those experiences, let alone most of the people I graduated with. My story is not part of my own yearbook at all, save a posed superlative for ‘most artistic,’  so I can’t turn to its pages to remember. 

Consider that each photo freezes a moment that can recall before, during, and after for the subject. From the sideline photo, the varsity football player remembers the pass, the run past the goal, and the roar of the crowd, and knows that his experiences in football shaped who he is. But the puppy cuddler also remembers his anxiety about an impossible test earlier in the day, how he laughed as the puppy licked his face, how he walked out of the room talking with someone he’d never met before. Maybe that afternoon started a new friendship, or reminded him to find some joy amid the stress. In his life, that moment mattered at least as much as the touchdown — but he didn’t know it then. He flips open his yearbook a decade later and sees the photo of himself with a puppy in his arms. Some puzzle pieces of his life fit together then, because that photo brings everything that mattered about the moment back to him. 

Midway through an extra-long production day, I text a friend: “Every story and photo we publish has the potential to help someone understand their life.” 

The response comes quickly: “A little lofty.” 

“I need lofty right now,” I reply and get back to work. But the thought sticks.

I’d like to think our yearbook staffers learn that small stories matter. I’d like to think that this act of noticing becomes a life skill. There’s a bit of ‘This is Water’ in the whole thing, which can’t be all bad. 

I wasn’t kidding. The superlatives and the senior roster photos were the only sections in color.

Yearbook is an exercise in self-control. 

We’re still developing our staff manual for yearbook, but the one policy that was etched in stone this year was around social media. It’s a draw for yearbook photographers to be able to share their work on Instagram, and I’d been seeing too many photos quickly edited just for the shares and likes. “I do it for the dopamine,” one junior told me, as I tried not to roll my eyes. 

“While a student photographer owns the copyright to their creative work, photography on behalf of student publications uses publication resources — training, time, team support, equipment, and more. Student photographers should prioritize our publication teams over personal sharing,” the policy states. Then it presents a few concrete rules on how to make sure an album of photos is complete and usable by student publications before any social sharing takes place.

Yearbook is kind of a marshmallow test. 

I ask students to take thousands of photos, and then I ask them to wait for months to see just a few of those photos published in a book. I’d like to think that the book is a mouthful of marshmallows — worth the wait — except I’m not sure it is. Social media makes high school all about the quick share. When I’m logged into our publications’ accounts, I scroll through gameday photos with hundreds of likes. Even professional photographers edit quickly to post on Instagram. School districts invest thousands to maintain a social media presence that posts same-day, so that parents can like, comment, and repost. We’re all addicted to the dopamine, and that chemical flow runs in the opposite direction from a 240-page book that is not published until the end of the school year.

Our social media policy was a compromise. I asked photographers to write three-sentence captions with quotes on several photos and to make sure their albums were correctly filed before any social sharing. They had to slow down and think about the storytelling associated with their photos before clicking share. It worked, to an extent. More than once, I had to remind a student about the rules. Some captions were rushed, some albums were misfiled. But students reported that the policy was an incentive to take the steps we needed for yearbook before seeking the likes. ‘We before me’ slows down the instant gratification. 

Social media algorithms launched in 2009 and keep evolving. What we see in our feeds is what is most likely to keep us scrolling — right now, right this minute. A yearbook, by contrast, shows you faces and events even when they didn’t center your own activities. You can look up names in the index rather than scrolling back years in a team’s feed — if that feed even still exists. You can open the book to remember your story without waking up a device.

The goals are in tension. Our policy was a small but effective gesture toward keeping them distinct.

Yearbook is an altruistic act. 

I’d never heard it described quite so reflectively as our newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Matthew, wrote in his senior column this year:

Journalism is such an altruistic act that forces you to look beyond yourself. It forces you to listen more closely and recognize that your experiences aren’t necessarily the ones that always matter. Being a part of a news staff has changed how I view things and think as a person.

That word, altruism, has been rattling around in my head since I read his draft. It sits above the fourth grade reading level we aim for in journalistic writing, but I don’t know a better word for what we ask student journalists to do, especially in the delayed-gratification task of putting a yearbook together.

So much of high school is about seeking the spotlight and establishing personal identity. We ask student journalists to shine that spotlight on their peers instead. They stand on the sidelines with a camera — not on the field making goals. They interview students to learn their stories, transcribe their notes, shape experiences into journalistic form — rather than being the subject of those stories. They figure out how to design pages that are readable, inviting, and aligned to a theme — not designing for their own self-expression. 

Over my teaching career, most of it spent in visual arts education, I’ve leaned toward framing artmaking with some level of service to others. But advising student journalism is so production- and deadline-driven that I sometimes lose a clear perspective on purpose. My students are still defining their own sense of purpose — so what can I do to convince them that shifting the spotlight and serving others through storytelling is worth it?

I tried to dig a little deeper on the idea of altruism with Matthew during our final yearbook production week. He was a leader on both the newspaper and yearbook teams this year, and he’d come back from his senior week to help finish the book. He nodded and said, “yes,” but he was deep in the work: sorting through our coverage log to make sure that each student was included in the year’s story. Click by click, album by album, upload by upload, he nudged our coverage up to 75% of our 1170 students appearing in a 240-page book at least three times. 

Altruism is quiet, steady, hardworking — like Matthew. The definition includes some cost to self, and I see this in the long hours spent behind lenses and in front of screens. No reward is promised. No grades, no expectation of praise, and the student journalists I work with have even grown to expect criticism and handle it gracefully. They do the work because they believe the stories matter. They have learned to look beyond themselves.

All of this altruism runs counter-culture in a high school. It might be essential to making our world a better place. And student journalism might be a way to teach it. I know, lofty again — but maybe that’s the point.

We clicked ‘send’ on our fall delivery book on Friday night, and now I have about a month to reflect and distract myself before it’s time to start all over. I’ll close this ramble with a question. If nearly every high school in the country publishes a yearbook, where is the research on what students actually learn through the work of creating it? I’ve been around the student journalism community long enough now to recognize all the sentimental anecdotes, including the ones I’ve written about here. But if I want to last another few years in the grind of advising, I want more than stories — I’m seeking evidence and systems. Send me your papers, I need the citations.