The month of May is the point at which we devote considerable time to preparing for graduation. For the fifth graders, it’s time to work on creating skits from funny anecdotes provided by the sixth graders’ parents. This is a tradition that has been part of graduation for more years than I have been at Miquon. My guess is that it was started to give the fifth graders some attention and importance that could balance with the amount of focus on their older classmates. Keeping the secrecy of the skits is incredibly important, and it is rare for our fifths to crumble under the endless questioning of the sixths. Silence is power.
We used to do the skits on graduation day, but that changed quite a few years ago when we had a graduating class of 25 students and were concerned about the length of the ceremony. The moving of the skits to the night before graduation and having an all-school family picnic has given it a more informal setting and truly puts the fifth graders into the spotlight. In music class, they start learning to play “Pomp and Circumstance” on kazoos — a touch of whimsy at the end of graduation itself. May is also the time that many of our fifth graders begin thinking seriously about the fact that they will be at Miquon for just one more year.
The sixth graders become involved with several graduation-related things. They make some decisions about the color and typeface of the “Class of 2017” t-shirts that they will wear to Skit Night. They run a couple of soft pretzel sales to raise money for their gift to the school, and they begin researching possible gifts by talking to staff and discussing their own ideas. As always, their own suggestions have ranged from the practical (more sports equipment) to the impossible (air-conditioning for the classrooms).
They start working on their music for the ceremony. In 1982, when the school was celebrating its 50th year, Tony Hughes wrote “Miquon in our Hearts,” which remains our much-loved official school song. Some years later, John Krumm was our music teacher. He wrote a beautiful second song for graduation — “Fields of Childhood” — that weaves its words and melody throughout the structure of Tony’s song and is performed by the graduates while the audience sings Tony’s composition. The graduates also choose one or two other pieces to do as well, usually ones that relate in some way to saying farewell to their school and community, and this occupies most of their time in music class during the month.
Most importantly, they begin creating their graduation speeches. Student speeches — where did they come from? I will confess to starting that tradition. Until we began it, our graduates were unheard throughout the ceremony until they sang at the end. But one year — too many years ago for me to recall just which one — I was on an accreditation committee for a neighboring independent elementary school. Part of their documentation mentioned that each of their 6th grade graduates stepped up to the microphone during their graduation ceremony to announce something about their experience that mattered to them — a word, a phrase, a sentence. Not much more. And I thought, we can do better than that. As it happened, our graduating class that year was quite small, so it looked like a good year to add something to what would otherwise be a very short ceremony. And we never looked back after that.
One year, something went wrong with the sound track on what was then a video-taped recording. There was a hum that disrupted the clarity of the students’ speeches. I took it to a local shop to see if it could be rescued. They put it on a player attached to a television in their showroom. Several adults who were not connected with the school stopped to watch and listen. One said with wonder, “All of those kids can speak!” Yes, they could. Although the hum could not be fixed, I’d like to hope that we got an enrollment or two out of that moment.
This speech-writing often seems to our sixth graders to be a daunting task at first, but it turns out to be a time of reflection, sharing of memories, laughter about funny experiences, and lots of thoughtful conversation as their texts evolve. Most students create three substantive paragraphs. We ask them to select a quotation that relates in some way to their message and write a few sentences that explain the connection. There’s a lot of conversation around those quotations. What do they mean, really? Who said those words, and what were the circumstances? The second paragraph is about their main idea. We ask them to write descriptively about something that they believe has been important in their Miquon experience. It may be about acquiring a new skill or interest, the value of friendship, learning to persevere in the face of difficulty, an exhilarating chase game or flying trip down the snow-covered tubing hill . . . the possibilities are enormous.
The most important thing, we tell them, is that it should be personal — a speech that only you could give. The third paragraph wraps it all up. And then they are ready to work on practicing their delivery. This all takes several weeks. The speeches go through many revisions in that time. Students often decide on a different quote as their ideas develop and change. Teachers focus on helping students express their ideas with clarity, and we do some coaching around grammar, but it’s important that the final text belongs entirely to the student and sounds like something created by an 11- or 12-year-old. We tell them that you may or may love public speaking, but it’s important to know that you can do it — because there are likely to be times in your life in which you will want or need to address an audience in support of something that matters to you.
Those gorgeous diplomas — they, too, were part of graduation before my time. But they were much less artistic and planned in my first years. Much less. They were done on big pieces of brown paper with markers, available in what was then the art room (now the after-school building) for anyone to stop in and write a celebratory description or memory on a child’s page. Now we devote several staff meetings to collect ideas from archived reports and recent memories, meetings that are filled with loving observations about each child’s growth, passions, and essential nature.
Before the building of the play barn, before the building of the graduation stage under a hired tent, before the invention of the wheel, we did the ceremony near the stream — close to where the monkey bars are now. Families brought blankets, graduates sat on folding chairs, and they were passed on to their middle schools with just as much love, optimism, and sense of loss as we do now. Later years saw a formal sit-down post-graduation luncheon evolve that became increasingly expensive for families. The graduates’ swim party was moved away from graduation day so the girls’ hair styling was not admired and lost in the same 24 hours. The diplomas became longer and more wordy, but not necessarily better or more personal.
We do seem to move in a world of continuing escalation, despite our best hopes for simplicity. Graduation is now more formal: parents work to create some lovely ambience on the stage, we hire a (nearly) storm-proof tent, and the diplomas are more artistic and thoughtfully-worded. We’ve tried to scale some things back a bit, nonetheless. The graduation luncheon is now a simpler reception with light snacks. Diplomas are a bit shorter. The graduates’ swim party happens in the week before the big event. Still, as we say every year to our students, you will have graduations that cost you more time, effort, and money, but you will never have another one that is truly all about you. Treasure it.
Before we know it, Graduation Day will be upon us. It’s just about a month away.