Notes from Maine - 2021/06/13
This week, I was able to go see my niece graduate high school. On the surface, it’s a very boring event. We heard a platitudinal speech from a well-meaning ex-teacher and a performance of a song (full of effort!) from a chaos of seniors. That’s my new collective noun for seniors—a chaos of seniors. I hope it catches on.
Then, of course, you have the reading of names and the cheers and applause from the families. Fortunately, she went to a very small Maine high school. The list of names wasn’t too long. One teacher not only hugged each of his group, but actually bear hugged them and lifted them off the stage. You’ll probably be reading about it in a lawsuit or two coming soon.
I’m sure that some of those students had the time of their lives in high school. For them, the past year was torture because they couldn’t see their friends every day and horse around in the hallways. The next few years they will live with a strange sense of loss because their time in school petered out and then was punctuated with a weird, socially distanced, masked ceremony where even the trombone player played through her mask somehow.
But, good or bad, they are done with that part of their lives. I’m sure they’ll live with their parents for the next couple-dozen years (I read recently that the average Gen Z person is not expected to fully mature until age 43), but they’re done with compulsory school and they are now in charge of how to spend their time.
Their newly minted freedom was in stark contrast with the condition of the school employees. For the teachers and staff, the day was a temporary reprieve from the daily grind. They got to shove off one chaos of seniors in anticipation of the next batch coming their way. I’m sure each group of students presents different challenges and headaches. It’s probably refreshing to turn the page, but there also has to be a little anxiety about what’s coming in the fall. They say that a change is as good as a rest, but that can’t always be true. Some changes are clearly for the worse. Statistically, I would guess that about half of all changes bring a little more pain.
It was fun to try to remember what it was like those last few days of high school. I hated school. I just wasn’t good at learning in that way, so getting out was a huge day.
It was also fun to imagine myself in the situation of one of the teachers. I’ve had jobs where I work on a thing for a year or more and then finally get to set it adrift and move onto the next thing. There’s not usually a big ceremony at the end of my projects. That part would be fun.
At the end of the night, we all took pictures in the parking lot as the chaos dispersed. The best part was my niece’s joy. She was having a great time and her happiness was contagious. When I was her age, I couldn’t understand why they called it commencement. I could only see graduation as the end of my imprisonment. Through her eyes, I finally saw it as a beginning.
