The Pupils Found Their Teacher’s Yearbook. Someone Had Drawn Glasses.

In 2014 Vivian Rutten’s pupils at the Utrechts Stedelijk Gymnasium had an unusually good reason to visit the library. Their economics teacher had been a pupil at the school herself. Her graduation photo hung in the hall. The yearbooks offered further research.

What had she looked like at seventeen?

Rutten understood the appeal. She said she would have looked too. In the library’s 2005 yearbook, a pupil had drawn small glasses on her photo.

Teaching teenagers is hard enough without the library lending them your adolescence.

There were discoveries on her side too. Her former teachers were now her colleagues. Erik Kamerbeek, whom she had found a little frightening as a pupil, turned out to be perfectly pleasant to work with. He had also, in those days, had a moustache.

Kamerbeek, interviewed by the school magazine in 2015, said pupils cheered him up: clever, funny, no two days alike. He could not imagine swapping them for an office. Lateness, however, was unbearable.

This is the distinction every parent understands. You can be delighted that young people exist and still have a pointed question about when they intend to put their shoes on.

By his retirement interview in 2025, Kamerbeek felt relationships at the school had become more open. Young people could still be impossible; friendliness and clarity usually helped. And he described a reunion where former pupils who had left three years earlier, and others who had left thirty years earlier, greeted him warmly and asked for photos with him.

They had finished school. They could have avoided the teacher altogether. Instead they wanted him in the picture.

I have been on the wrong end of the yearbook problem. When we visited my parents in Surrey last Christmas, the middle one found my school photograph from 1991 in a drawer. I had a fringe I would describe as architectural.

She photographed it. Within an hour it was the background on all three children’s phones. Within a day it was on the eldest’s, with small glasses drawn on.

I have asked for it to be removed. The middle one said, reasonably, that she was only doing research. The eldest said he would remove it if I removed the photo of him in the sailor suit from the hall.

The sailor suit stays. So, for now, do the glasses.