The End of Days, School Days That Is

courtesy of Pixabay CC0 Public Domain

The End Of Time

It seemed at times as if this day would never arrive. At least the students tell me it felt that way to them. To me this day has come all too soon.

Our Middle School has a big ceremony today for the Eighth Graders. The ceremony is not as big as it once was. And, after complaints from some parents, the name of the ceremony was changed.

In the past, the Eighth Grade Award Ceremony was called the Eighth Grade Graduation. Someone pointed out, finally, that the students were not graduating from the Eighth Grade, they were matriculating from Middle School to High School. Since no one wanted to rename the ceremony the Eighth Grade Matriculation Ceremony because, honestly, many of our students' parents would not know what matriculation meant, the powers that be renamed it the Eighth Grade Award Ceremony.

Along with a new name, the Ceremony has been shortened considerably. At one point in the past, the “Graduation” dragged on for nearly three hours. They had music from the chorus, guest speakers (yes, plural), the awards presentations, and the reading of the roll of all the Eighth Grade Class, while the students marched past the podium and shook hands with the Principal and Assistant Principal. Our Eighth Grade Class averages about two hundred students, so you can imagine how long this all took, and this in the days before our gym was air conditioned.

The Ceremony still includes one guest speaker, a song or two from the chorus, and the presentation of awards. The march in review has been eliminated. The whole thing takes about ninety minutes now. Parents are happier, students are happier, and the teachers who have to attend the Ceremony are happier.

The six and seventh grade classes were required to attend the old Graduation Ceremony in the mistaken belief that witnessing the pageantry would somehow inspire them to stay in school. I kid you not, that was the rationalization for making four hundred eleven, twelve, and thirteen year olds sit on the bleachers in a scorching hot gym for three hours, and expecting them to maintain a respectful silence the whole time.

Eventually, seating became an issue. After the air conditioning was installed in the gymnasium, more parents started showing up for the Ceremony, meaning there wasn’t enough room for first the sixth graders, and a year later, the seventh graders. The only way a sixth or seventh grader is allowed to attend the Ceremony now is if they have a relative in the Eighth Grade and a parent comes, signs them out, and takes them to the Ceremony.

I remember when I finished Eighth Grade, it was part of junior high back then, we didn’t have a Ceremony, or an awards presentation. What we did was spend the last day of school cleaning out lockers, turning in text books, and at the end of the day they gave us our report cards and we learned if we’d been promoted or retained. Then we went home for the summer.

Times have sure changed. These days we seem to be constantly finding reasons to give students awards, certificates, and recognition and it gets more and more difficult to motivate them to do much of anything. In my day we worked hard to get our grades and all the recognition we expected as an A or B on our report card and the only award was the award of being promoted if we’d done our work and passed all our classes.

When you reward a student for doing the minimum he or she is supposed to do anyway, the student comes to expect to be rewarded for every little thing he or she does, and if the rewards stop so does the effort. But what do I know? Between Scouting and teaching I’ve only got thirty-two combined years of working with youth. I don’t have a fancy advanced degree from a prestigious university. All I have is practical experience actually interacting with a wide diversity of children. In today’s world, practical experience doesn’t seem to carry as much weight as a fancy advanced degree.

As always, I remain,

The Exhausted Educator