Tuesday, May 04, 2010

School Colors

Every year I make a graduation card for my seniors. Since I teach AP Spanish I almost always have at least one class of seniors, so for the last four years I have kept up the tradition. I don’t have  a lot of graduation paraphernalia, so they almost always look something like this:

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Our school colors are purple and gold, and while it’s very festive, it has never been a favorite combination of mine. In the past I have used a paler yellow and hoped everyone would just imagine that it was gold. However, this year I ran out of the pale yellow and the only thing I had was, incidentally, the actual gold that is one of our school colors. So that’s how it went down, although I have to say I am not a fan of how they turned out this year.

School colors are fascinating to me. In junior high and high school my school colors were maroon and gold. Very unattractive--and if you ever saw us in PE class with our gold shirts and maroon shorts you would understand why. I hope you never did. Maroon and gold tend to be very popular with schools. Why, I ask you?

Some schools manage to get school colors right. BYU had the classic combination of blue and white. Now blue and white is nice. It is classic. Blue and white does not cause retinal damage when you look at it. The first school I taught at also had school colors of blue and white. And I might add that any shade of blue goes well with white and looks very nice.

The two Catholic schools where I taught both had school colors of green and gold. I also got my master’s degree from a school whose colors were green and gold. Okay, not fabulous, but at least a combination that you do see in nature, and again, very traditional colors. And green and gold makes a very nice graduation card!

So, I conclude:

  1. It it is fun to dress up and even paint your face in purple and gold, and since I am on the purple team, cheer for the purple team in all school events.
  2. I like blue and white.
  3. For crafty items (and for my optical health) I believe I will be going back to pale yellow. Sorry, gold!

1 comment:

Lara Neves said...

I saw you in your maroon and gold PE uniform. Those were such the worst things ever! Ugh.

I think white is always a good choice, and I'll never understand the whole gold thing. I could have gone for Maroon and white, you know?

We're red and black at this University, which is good. I like that.