HARLINGEN — At the very beginning of the school year, Jodie Stryker prepares her students to produce an award-winning yearbook.
Jodie is not only a business computer applications teacher at Marine Military Academy. She’s also in charge of MMA’s yearbook, called Pass In Review.
She will bring out one of her high school yearbooks, “which is always good for a laugh to see how things were in the ‘old days,’” she says.
But then she asks her students to think about what they want their yearbook to look like years down the road.
“I tell them, one day somebody’s going to pull this yearbook that you’re creating off a shelf, whether it be your spouse, your children, maybe even your grandkids, and it’s going to be your history book,” she says.
“So, think about how you want to be remembered. Not just you, but how your senior class wants to be remembered.”
Once Jodie defines their mission in those terms, “it clicks” with the yearbook students.
“When they see the ownership in it, then it just kind of comes together,” she says.
Jodie has been in charge of the MMA yearbook for seven years. And for the past four years in a row, the yearbook has won the prestigious National Yearbook Program of Excellence Award.
There really isn’t a secret to it. She says, “It’s everything. It’s pictures, it’s writing, it’s meeting deadlines, it’s making sure every student on campus” is well represented.
The national yearbook standard calls for every student on campus to be covered a minimum of three times. But Jodie raises the bar.
“We want to make sure every student is in there at least five times,” she says.
“So, it’s not just your popular kids, but the kids that might be involved in chess. The chess club might not get as much notoriety as an athlete, but in the yearbook, they will get that, regardless of what they’re in.”
The process for producing the yearbook begins at the end of the preceding year. That’s when students submit an application to be on the yearbook staff.
They have to fill out an application and include recommendations. One of those must be from their current English teacher.
During the summer, Jodie goes through the applications and will come up with her “A Team.”
Once the new school year begins, putting together the yearbook becomes a collaborative effort. It must be completed before Spring Break.
But from the very beginning, the students have a sense of competitiveness. A sense that, “last year’s yearbook was great; what can we do to be on the cutting edge this year?” Jodie says.
