The graduation ceremony isn’t your reward for your work. At least, it shouldn’t be. Your reward for graduating is the opportunities that you’ve opened for yourself for the next chapter of your life. I didn’t go to mine and I haven’t regretted it for a second. The knowledge didn’t leave my brain, at least not as a result of missing graduation.
My memory of my high school graduation ceremony was staring into the hot sun sweating up a dress shirt under a cheap and useless polyester smock that cost me a lot more than it cost to make while people I didn’t care about and who didn’t care about me made speeches with completely fake gravitas. It was the last time I saw a couple dozen people whose names I used to know and a couple hundred people whose names I never learned.
Why the fuck do we still bother with this crap? Who is it for?
Well, at the end of mine I handed the principal a frog instead of shaking his hand. I considered that worth the cost of admission, even taking into account having to leg it afterwards. (They did try, but failed, to withhold my diploma over it. That part was almost as hilarious as frog itself.)
I was already on the administration’s shit-list for calling out the selfsame principal earlier that week for taking credit for our star overachiever student when, in point of fact, the principal had just transferred to that school the same year as this kid’s senior year and was therefore not present for 75% of it. Pointing this out publicly, during the principal’s speech crowing over this, was apparently “not appropriate.”
The graduation ceremony isn’t your reward for your work. At least, it shouldn’t be. Your reward for graduating is the opportunities that you’ve opened for yourself for the next chapter of your life. I didn’t go to mine and I haven’t regretted it for a second. The knowledge didn’t leave my brain, at least not as a result of missing graduation.
My memory of my high school graduation ceremony was staring into the hot sun sweating up a dress shirt under a cheap and useless polyester smock that cost me a lot more than it cost to make while people I didn’t care about and who didn’t care about me made speeches with completely fake gravitas. It was the last time I saw a couple dozen people whose names I used to know and a couple hundred people whose names I never learned.
Why the fuck do we still bother with this crap? Who is it for?
Parents/grandparents. What are kids for but as a vessel to live vicariously through?
Well, at the end of mine I handed the principal a frog instead of shaking his hand. I considered that worth the cost of admission, even taking into account having to leg it afterwards. (They did try, but failed, to withhold my diploma over it. That part was almost as hilarious as frog itself.)
I was already on the administration’s shit-list for calling out the selfsame principal earlier that week for taking credit for our star overachiever student when, in point of fact, the principal had just transferred to that school the same year as this kid’s senior year and was therefore not present for 75% of it. Pointing this out publicly, during the principal’s speech crowing over this, was apparently “not appropriate.”