I'd like to say that this brought back memories of my own 8th grade moving up ceremony, but it didn't -- those memories have been present since then.
In 8th grade, we had an English teacher named Mr. Freeze at the beginning of the year. He was a strange dude -- if you were getting answers right, he'd call on you for the next one and say, "Go ahead, Todd, you're batting a hundred." He also told us once about a dream he'd had about going into a bakery to get a loaf of bread, and instead of bread in the display, there was his worst enemy, bread size. He ordered him from the baker, who put him in the slicer and then into a bag. As was Mr. Freeze's custom with a fresh loaf of bread, he told us, he then ate the end piece / scalp, nice and warm.
He left in the middle of the year for a reason I don't remember, and he was replaced by the woman who was quickly everyone's favorite teacher -- Ms. Rabinowitz. She was young and cool and smart and a great teacher, and we all wanted her to like us. At my 8th grade prize night, every section of every class gave two awards for excellence. On the day of the ceremony, Ms. Rabinowitz took me and my friend Larry aside, and said, "I just want you two to know that you've done really wonderful work this year." To me, this meant we were a shoe-in for the awards for that class.
Of course, that night the awards went to Steve M. and Monica G. Her talk to us, I understood, was the consolation prize. I appreciated that, but the fact that this is the only specific memory I have from her wonderful 8th grade English class has been the subject of my own speech to the student body when I have presented our student prize in math. Prizes can distract from what's important, and it's questionable to me whether they have value at all in an educational setting.
For me, this all fit nicely into a box until I reconnected with Larry lately through Facebook. I asked Larry what he remembered from 8th grade English. He told me that he remembered Ms. Rabinowitz giving Larry and me some dialogue from a play, but without the stage directions. It was our task to go out into the hall and work out a presentation of the text that would make it make sense to our classmates. Larry said he remembered thinking that there was no way we'd be able to do that, but we worked at it and we pulled it off.
So, to recap: Larry remembers a teacher giving him a challenging task that he didn't think he could do, but then did successfully, and felt the pride earned from a job well done. I remember not getting a prize.
There's something here that a therapist can unravel that explains why I've chosen a career in teaching.
In Emma's school district, the 8th grade ceremony is sort of anti-climactic. There's only one high school, and it's down the hall from the middle school. In fact, some of the resources are shared. So while it is a milestone to enter high school, it's not very dramatic.
For Emma, that isn't the case. This is her last year at Webutuck, as she'll be attending Millbrook in the fall. We all have mixed feelings about that. We've liked the schooling she's gotten, and we really like her friends. When the chorus sang the obligatory graduation song with the cliched but oh-so-true lyrics, it was actually very hard to listen. This is a moment of change in Emma's life, and although we're not moving and I'm sure her friends will remain an important part of her life, it is very different not to go to school with them every day. It was a pretty emotional moment for Emma, and thus for her parents. Sometimes, even cliches are true.
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