cvaxes
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| | Though I've had to skip some years and trash the (24th Oct 17 at 6:15am UTC) | | "Given that we live in an era in which even the cheapest cell phones now come equipped with cameras, maybe schools -- if they must persist with selling our children back to us on photo stock -- should take a more imaginative approach."I don't buy them," says another D.But individual school pictures we don't like, many of us. We do not cringe at appallingly written essays marked "See me" (not yet, anyway). I don't even know where half of them are..
We like the group picture, with the teacher, and we're happy to pay for it. Her[/i] Examiner column appears on Thursday.No, we flinch because there, inescapably, are fresh sheets of colorful paper stapled together bearing the headline: "Picture Day is Coming!"One glimpse of that paperwork and twang go the guilt strings. "Though I've had to skip some years and trash the pictures because they turned Wheel Hubs out awful," she concedes, "and sometimes that 'Italian ice blue' background is too much to handle.C."I hate it, I hate it," says a frazzled Bethesda mother. "Capture the Moment," we are urged, in curly, persuasive writing. Basically, for each child it's 'Here's another $36 check for a packet of pictures that's going to sit in a file. "We buy the basic package, but only out of a twisted obligation. mother firmly, "because, as a former police reporter, they remind me of what we used to call the 'pick up,' the photo of the murdered kid you had to go ask for from the grieving family. Maybe it's because the snaps are taken by strangers, and maybe it's because every kid in the class gets the same background, but school photos have the effect of reducing one's own endearing, quirky child to a bland, smiling Everychild -- like a face on the milk carton.C.[i][i]Examiner [i]Columnist Meghan Cox Gurdon is a former foreign correspondent and a regular contributor to the books pages of the Wall Street Journal. "I like them," says one, a D. In D. ."We don't want to let the time pass by! We do want to share our pride! Wheel Hubs But - ugh! Can't we do it some other way? We love our children, really we do, but we don't want images of them radiating a soft-focus halo, or smiling with one hand on a globe, or pressed coyly up against a tree, or, as one local mother remembers with perplexity, "posed in front of a cut-out cactus. I have the idea that I'll put them in order but that will never happen. Share your pride in their accomplishments.. "
At public school, we get a double whammy: Back to school and year-end photos," she says.C."I do buy them because I feel bad about my kids being the only ones walking out without photos."For me, it's disquieting that children in school photos always look the same."The obligation is, of course, twofold: Those of us who knuckle under the pressure do so to honor our children and, ideally, the grandparents who will receive the shiny 3 x 5s with rapture; we're also aware that photo sessions raise money for schools, and we feel cheese paring if we don't contribute.' "A Virginia mother agrees. "Don't let this time pass by. We like encountering old photos of Miss Koepp, our fourth-grade teacher, Drive shaft with ourselves beaming goofily from the third row. Here. They are troublesome relics of the past, like the appendix: Still around though no one needs them, their only apparent purpose being occasionally to flare up and cause expense.Wouldn't it be great if, instead of the gormless grins of today, parents could buy stiff, sepia-toned school portraits, in the style of Matthew Brady? Who wouldn't vastly prefer, say, scenes of playground combat in black and white, as if captured by Robert Capa?Now those would be school pictures worth having.True, there are some soft touches in the crowd. mother who says she enjoys seeing her children's faces evolve in a multiyear progression of same-angle shots.We do not recoil because the child's books are crusted with the accrued crumbs of a hundred lunchtime cookies (that comes later).It's that time of year when millions of mothers open their children's school backpacks and wince.[/i][/i] | |
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