Teacher quotes.
This may be one of the more controversial yearbook ideas, but you should probably let your teachers have a say in the yearbook too. We find that sometimes, they can actually be quite funny.
You can either let them say anything they want for their yearbook quotes, or ask them to stick to a theme.
Give them a theme:
Rather than simply featuring a teacher page and allowing them to quote whatever they want, we suggest giving them a theme. This will add an element of consistency, and consistency is always good in yearbooks.
You can either give them a broad theme like ‘funny quotes’ or ‘quotes from movies’, or you can challenge them a little and make the theme more niche. They have spent the last seven years challenging you after all. Here are some of our favourite teacher quote theme ideas:
Quote your subject
Tell your teachers that their quotes need to be related to their subjects. So your English teachers need to quote someone like Shakespeare, your physics teacher could quote Isaac Newton, and your defence against the dark arts teacher could quote Professor Snape.
Quote in rhyme
Everything is better in rhyme. So if your teacher have the time, it certainly wouldn’t be a crime, to make your yearbook shine.
Half rhyme is still a rhyme. Jeez.
But anyway, why not ask your teachers to quote in rhyme, it is challenging, rhymes are great, and it’s a good chance to see if your English teachers can practice what they preach.
What I wish I knew
Teachers often like to dish out advice in their yearbook quotes. But rather than letting them reel out the clichés like ‘believe in yourself’, ‘you haven’t lost until you quit trying’ and ‘give up on Family Guy after season seven, it goes downhill fast’, ask them to put a bit more thought in.
Ask your teachers to give you the one piece of advice that they wish someone had given them when they left school. This can result in an interesting, touching, and genuine teacher quotes page. For what it’s worth, mine would be ‘Never trust someone who doesn’t put a Hula Hoop on the end of each finger and wiggle them about before eating them’. But that’s a long story.
Choose the right teachers:
You don’t have to let every single teacher write a quote for your yearbooks. You can be selective. We’re not saying that you should just ask your favourites, or only pick ones that you like. But maybe just ask teachers who actually know you.
Rather than the science teacher whose name you can’t quite remember because she’s been at the school less than a year, ask the teachers who have been there for the long haul. The maths teacher who has taught you since year seven, your tutor who you’ve seen every morning for five years.
If you ask a teacher who barely knows you to write a quote for your yearbook, you’ll end up with something that they found on Google the night before they sent it to you. (Yes teachers do that too.) But if you only ask teachers who really know you, and have memories of you when you were younger, and maybe even like you, you will end up with quotes that actually mean something.
Provide feedback:
If there is one thing that teacher love, it’s marking. We’ll maybe they’re not that fond of it, but they do it. And they do it for a reason. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway; “The first draft of anything is always rubbish”. Unfortunately the original quote isn’t suitable for our website, but the sentiment remains the same. You can’t get everything right first time, in fact, you can very rarely get anything right first time, and neither can your teachers.
So if they provide you with a quote and you don’t like it, tell them. Don’t be rude, or sarcastic with your feedback, as tempting as that might be, but politely ask them if they can change the quote, or suggest that you edit it and send it back to them to approve.
Your yearbook is for you. It is to remember all of the amazing times at school by. So if you’re not happy with something that is supposed to be going in the yearbook, don’t just accept it. Give polite, constructive feedback, explain what you had in mind, and we are pretty sure your teachers won’t mind having a second attempt at it.
