Rock Island High School - Watchtower Yearbook (Rock Island, IL)

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Psst Wanna date? The suave and debonair Eric Schwartly and Eric Sarno use the “ultra-cool meth - Fun doesn’t end at the dance. Tim Black and Kurt od to pick up chicks” for special occasions. Samuelson laugh it up at a post dance gathering. Better safe than sorry. Troy Ellis and his date duck under cover to hide from any stray drizzle. Debbie Posateri adds a few finishing touches before her date arrives. Opening 19

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f 4 Not just another night To high schoolers, dances added a bit of zest to an otherwise bleak weekend. They were social gatherings where we forgot about parents, jobs, and the pressures of school (even though most dances were held there). Dances were important, and we put a lot of preparation into them. First off, a big problem was finding a date. Many a night was spent pouring through last year ' s yearbook for an appealing face. And even then, who was to say your choice would want you ? If you found a date you could rest easy for the big night , provided you hoarded all your money until then. One could never guess if your date would suddenly crave a lobster tail or not. So comes the big day. If you were on a committee you got the gym decorated. Then you spent the rest of the day with your friends, and without meaning to, wasted so much time you had to rush to get ready. Or maybe you forgot to pick up flowers and the florist was closed. Nonetheless; your date picked you up, or you picked up your date, parents took pictures by the fireplace, beemed brightly, and loudly repeated the time of curfew three times. The whole ordeal was over in a couple of hours. And then the entire process started over. A new music video oriented dance posed a problem tor Jeremy Foy. Tracy Stombaugh wanted to go. but not with him. Nothing like a little “bubbly” gum before a dance! Christy Anderson, Tonya Chapman, Kelly Fairman. Missy Esparza, and Jenny Taylor arranged center- pieces for the Homecoming dance. i ft O

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1500 Minutes a week Hanging upside down is an exhilerating way to study for Melissa Seward and Tracy Firlus. No one can learn it for you. How many times have your parents told you that when you ' ve asked to stay home from school because of a shocking development in your favorite soap? We all know they are right, but how much can you learn in school ? We spend 330 minutes during a school day in class. Subtract five minutes a hour for attendance and sitting down, then multiply that number by five to get the number of minutes in a school week. You come out with 1500 minutes or 90,000 seconds. Every second of every minute during that time you r brain is receiving information that is totally new to it. No one can hear, learn, understand, put together, and remember all of that data. That ' s what I ' ve been saying all along. So how come we are required to know everything a teacher says when the tests are handed out ? a student asks. Because no one can learn everything in an hour of class. No one is expected to. This is why studying was invented. The difference between the student who sits in front of you and gets straight A ' s and the one behind you who gets by with C ' s may not be intelligence, but hard work. A student who wants to succeed in school knows that he or she is not done with a lesson when the bell rings. They must start the lesson all over again that night and keep going over it until they understand it. Because we are not able to learn everything a teacher presents to us in class, we must go back over what we missed. In essence, everyone is a teacher. In the same way an athlete must train his body; a student must train his mind. The time spent learning a subject out of school is just as , if not more, important than the time spent learning in school. For in the end, it is important that you know the material, not the other person. And that knowledge comes only through hard work and desire. No one can learn it for you. 20 Opening Having a friend to study with helps the learning process run smoother, as Dave Slivken and Marji Murphy discover.