A Lifetime Impact: Ms. Wollerton

Ms. Wollerton, English, Speech, Yearbook - Return on investment is common terminology in the financial arena. Of just about any class I've taken, grade school, undergrad and graduate school, I'd have to say I've received the highest return on the investment from taking Yearbook. Amazing when I think that it was a course for which I signed up to simply fill an elective my Junior year of high school. I participated in two years of Yearbook and the principles I learned in those two years I've used weekly since entering church ministry. Meticulously, Ms. Wollerton instructed us in the principles of page layouts, headline and caption writing, capturing the essence of an event or period of time in a matter of paragraphs, how to establish a theme across a collection of pages, how to crop pictures among many other details that appear in the weekly bulletin. They're lessons I've passed along to my staff not just in the bulletin, our brochures and the webpage.

In producing the Yearbook index, I was trusted to work in the main IT server room, without adult supervision into the wee hours of the morning - a privilege I took very seriously and considered a great honor. In my Senior year a simple composition of mine was used as the theme for the entire book, I designed graphics and a photograph to coincide that were used throughout the publication. It was amazing to see my work on a printed page with hundreds of copies in the hands of the student body.

In Speech I learned to communicate verbally to an audience, specifically how to think on my feet. Elements that come in handy in the midst of business meetings. Ms. Wollerton invested an inordinate amount of time in these classes instructing me, setting high expectations, equipping me to meet them and then challenging me to exceed them.

Though I'm not in a classroom on a daily basis, I hope the few chances I have to show our students how something works or talk to them about how I do what I do or to talk with the Yearbook staff, that I too will give them nuggets that last a lifetime.