Hey grads, you're not special

Nah...I was one of those that could have taken AP classes. I was happy with my 2.67 GPA and state school where I rocked it out to a solid 2.71...and look where I am now!

 

Now that we have that out of the way, might as well finish the job.

Parents, your kids aren't special, either.

 

I don't think there is anything wrong with celebrating the high schoolers.

They'll all be beat down, bitter, frustrated and either working in retail or absorbing crushing grad school debt in four years anyway.

 

I became bitter the summer after graduating.

 

I always think that "follow your passion" is weird advice, particularly to kids that young. I'm 35, and I'm still not exactly sure what my "passion" is. "Journalism" seems a little broad.

The better advice: Now is a great time to sample a lot of different passions.

 

My wife just sat in a blazing high-noon California sun through a 2-hour graduation ceremony that featured 3 songs and 20 -- that's right, 20 -- students' speeches.

And it was for 6th graders.

 

My unborn child will have 1, make that 2 graduations....high school and college...the rest are expected!

 

I am so, so sorry.

 

My pet peeve is elementary school graduation. Not only is it silly, it's mean.

The ones I have been to list the accomplishments of the kids when they call their names -- honor roll, quiz bowl team, presidents list, all-county band, etc., etc.

But for half the kids they just said their names. That's embarrassing.

I like the way most high schools do it. List the kids with honors but you don't mention all their honors when they walk across the stage.

 

I was glad my son's middle school didn't have an eighth-grade commencement because they are not graduating from anything. They're just being promoted to high school.

 

I'm on the fence about this. On the one hand, it's kind of refreshing to hear someone in academia debunk the everybody's-a-winner mentality. On the other hand, for a lot of kids on the low end of the scholastic food chain, high school graduation is one of the most important days of their lives, a significant achievement, and it seems a little mean-spirited to piss on their big day.

BTW, the school my kids graduated from had a separate awards day, when they announced all the honors and scholarship winners. They had to, because my daughter's class (2008) had about 350 graduates, and they weren't the only school graduating in that location on that day. So there wasn't time to list all the honors as they walked across the stage, nor, for that matter, for any kind of guest speaker. It was get them in, get a few short remarks from the principal and the valedictorian, walk them through and get them out.

 

Class of '12 just sounds all kind of wrong. But at least they're out of the "aughts"

Did they ever come up with a name for that last decade? The zeros? The o's.