A Graduation Ceremony

By the time June rolls around, teachers at my school sort of look and act like zombies. We stumble around with vacant stares from sunken eyes. We talk to each other about our students in the same distant, haunted way that Vietnam vets might discuss the Tet Offensive. Even our collective sense of fashion and grooming habits have deteriorated noticeably.* This morning, however, we all bore witness to a ceremony that - if only momentarily - shook us from our cranky cynicism and restored proud smiles to our weary faces.

Every spring, our school's community gathers in the auditorium for the "Fifth Grade Moving-On Ceremony." It is an event for which girls appear in beautiful new dresses, with freshly manicured nails and intricately constructed hairstyles. The boys, on the other hand, can reliably be counted on to wander the hallways like stray dogs in the minutes before the ceremony in grotesquely oversized hand-me-down dress shirts, begging the nearest older passerby to tie their necktie for them. I was looking forward to the assembly, if for no reason other than it would allow me a break from what had become a mind-numbingly monotonous daily routine in our classroom.**

The auditorium was bustling with the graduating students' families when I arrived with my class, but all talking ceased when the fifth-graders began walking down the aisles toward the stage to "Pomp and Circumstance." They each looked supremely confident and mature, and I couldn't help but marvel at how long it seemed since so many of them were in my classroom last year. Ayana, one of my former students, led off the event with an astonishing a capella rendition of the National Anthem - no less impressive and unexpected than Napoleon Dynamite's dance - that earned a standing ovation.

After a few students had taken turns reading poems they had written for the occasion, the principal took the stage to call students by name to receive their elementary school diplomas. I rarely cry*** but it definitely got a little dusty in that auditorium as those names were read. It was one of those transcendent scenes of personal elation and professional fulfillment that I suspect not every job affords, and it reminded me of why I got myself into this business in the first place.

*Seriously, I have a beard right now, and you do NOT want to see any photos of it. It looks like I have mange.

**Once standardized testing ends in early June, teachers in my district are encouraged to find creative and ostensibly instructive ways to fill eight school days. All we really do on these days is alternate between watching a movie in class and taking an extended recess. I recently ran out of suitable movies from my personal collection to show the kids, and had to ask the students to bring their own movies to school. This was not a good idea. "Dead or Alive," which Ezekiel unpacked this morning, stands out as the most inappropriate of them all. I managed to track down its cover to share with you, and I suspect that you will be just as shocked as I was to learn that this movie is not, in fact, a porn.

***My sister would dispute this, having seen me cry upon viewing the wedding scenes of both Uncle Jesse and Aunt Becky in Full House AND Zack and Kelly in Saved by the Bell, but that's clearly irrelevant. Anyone with a functioning heart would weep buckets at the montages in those episodes. But I digress.