June 18, 1999: High School Graduation
I am free of High School. I am out, no more, the end, the beginning, hallelujah!
I think I'll just write some words here about what I thought of Masterman's graduation ceremony. For one thing, you simply can't rehearse the damn thing day in and day out, all day, for a whole week. After a while it grows tiresome and people begin to take it less seriously. You simply can't take it as seriously as Mr. Gannon and the rest of the administration does. It should be a fun time, a happy time, not the prison camp he makes it. Or, if you're going to act all serious then be serious. He kept threatening to throw people out of the rehearsal, and would then do so, but would let them back in 10 minutes later. With every threat that you don't carry through, your undermine your own power.
It's also funny that they take it so seriously because it all looks very shabby. They make us do this horrible walk down the aisle when we first enter, and it just looks stupid. The procession would look much better if we simply walked. We walk the other 3 times we go in the aisles, so I don't know why we march at the beginning. The gowns should also either be a uniform color, or distributed in some pattern other than girls get white and boys get blue. Since everyone sits on the risers in size order (which makes sense), what you get is this terrible random pattern of clumps of whites with a couple blue specks in the front and clumps of blue with specks of white in the back. My dad tells me it didn't look so bad this year, but it looked terrible this year. I think it'd be better if we all had one color, or formed some sort of coherent pattern once we sat on the risers.
Probably most important to me though, is that it should be made more clear that the slide show will be composed of slides submitted to whoever is in charge. Almost everyone assumed that some sort of effort was undertaken to represent everyone in the class. Not true at all. Although I was in a couple pictures (sort of), most of my friends did not appear at all, whereas there were 4 or so people who had at least half a dozen slides devoted to each of them. I was pretty irate when they showed the slide show during rehearsal when they did not yet have all of the slides because there were roughly 20 slides devoted to 6 different people. It was terrible. They fixed it somewhat for today, but still an awful lot of people were not represented. A shame.
All of our teachers should be allowed to come to graduation as well. Maybe it should be held on a Saturday to help facilitate this. At a school like Masterman, where the vast majority of students in the graduating class have been there since fifth or sixth grade, and each teacher knows many people in the class and has known them for years, it would be nice for them to see the class graduate. A teacher friend of mine remarked yesterday that most middle school teachers wished they could see how their students turned out by seeing them at graduation and that it's stupid for the administration to not allow this at Masterman.
I guess that's it for now.