The Saga of the Yearbook Staff T-Shirts, 2011-2012 Edition

When a new school year begins, the first order of business for any seriously journalistic, impressively professional, junior high yearbook staff is designing their staff t-shirts. And our seriously journalistic, impressively professional, junior high yearbook staff is no exception. We started designing our t-shirts in August.

By September, we had three possible designs.

We chose a design the first week in October, and then we "discussed" the color of t-shirt on which the design should be printed.

We "discussed" it for three weeks.

There were t-shirt color PowerPoint presentations, pro and con lists, secret ballots, public ballots, unbinding votes, binding votes, and arm wrestling tournaments.

And then we gave up on reaching a consensus and decided to have the t-shirts made in two colors.

Like I said, yearbook staff t-shirts are a serious business.

My first two years as yearbook advisor, we kept things simple and put our theme on the front of the shirts and nicknames on the back. Those were the years when I called the staffers my "Yearbook Jedi".


Last year, the staffers were "Yearbook Ninja"and, because ninja are so darn stealthy, the kidlets decided to live up to their title and keep the yearbook theme a secret.

So our staff shirts focused on their awesome ninja skills instead.


This year's staff didn't want to be Jedi or Ninja. They wanted to be minions.

Yearbook Minions.

I had never seen Despicable Me, the movie from whence the minions sprouted, so one of the staffers brought it in for us to watch while we tallied the yearbook favorites ballots.

Seeing the minions in action convinced me that it would be a good fit.



The movie minions are smart, hard-working, enthusiastic, spastic, and cute... in an awkward sort of way. Much like the yearbook minions, who are also smart, hard-working, enthusiastic, spastic, and cute... in an awkward sort of way.


Our next hurdle was coming up with the text to accompany the design. After several brainstorming sessions and many heads-down-on-the-desks-eyes-closed-secret-hand-raising-votes, they decided they wanted the camera holding minion shirt to read, "Don't Make Me Shoot You."


Gun references in school are almost always a bad idea, even if they are camera-related puns. So I asked the kids to come up with a non-violent alternative.


They put their heads together and came up with, "Don't make me shoot you... with my camera."
That didn't quite pass muster either, so they thought long and hard about it and came up with this...

Can you guess what it says?

"Don't make me shoot you with my camera", but in Swahili.
Turns out, Google Translate is a yearbook minion's best friend.

Minions Assemble! Now that our T-shirts have arrived, we have much work to do.

You know, like, take staff photos and then, maybe, make a yearbook?