End of School Year and Commencement Is Bittersweet

Another end of a year has come. No, it’s not the end of a calendar year, but anyone involved in education will know the time reference of which I speak. We educators, like the Chinese, have our own calendars. For most of us on a traditional school calendar, ours begins in August and ends in May.

I love education, and I love educating. Being able to give someone something that is part of what I love, my discipline, and getting paid to do it, is a marvelous privilege. I love getting to see people grow and develop, and in the four years of high school, adolescents make monumental strides in emotional maturation and intellectual development.

One of my favorite parts of my teaching responsibilities, but also one of the most strenuous, is the capstone experience my English IV students complete each spring. A capstone experience is a project sometimes undertaken by university-level undergraduates and most often graduate students, in the form a thesis or dissertation, which is accompanied by a presentation. While some might argue that much of what is “standardized” education may have no real-world applicability, the senior project does indeed instruct students in real-world skills.

The culmination of the senior project requires every senior to deliver a minimum 5-minute speech presented to a panel of community members who serve as judges. However, the senior project encompasses so much more than just the presentation.

Students begin work in the fall of their senior year by proposing the topics for their activities, which must involve a learning stretch. Some of the topics typically include learning to play a musical instrument, constructing a piece of furniture, or learning a skill such as cooking or sewing or rebuilding an engine. They are instructed to spend their fall semesters working on their projects, in order to face a completion deadline of February 28 the next semester.

When those students enter the English IV classroom in the spring, they begin researching a topic relevant to their projects. For instance, a student rebuilding an engine might research the Ford Motor Company. Another student crafting a wooden swing might research hardwoods and softwoods used in the building process. A student learning how to play the guitar might research musical trends in 20^th century pop culture.

Along the way, students receive guidance and are assessed on each individual component. During the overall process, I watch my students learn how to hone research skills, how to write more effectively, how to meet deadlines or suffer the consequences, how to explain step-by-step technical information to an audience, and how to present themselves to an audience as a polished “expert” on their respective subject.

I watch many of them, who had no discernible goals, suddenly realize that now they have a vocational or artistic skill they can use as a route to a career or for personal enjoyment, or sometimes both. I see students stretching towards to what sociologists would call self-actualization, which involves reaching one’s full potential.

During this process of witnessing students’ strengths and weaknesses, I come to feel closer to my students. One cannot watch another individual develop and expand without feeling this way—especially those who seem to need the most help. I know I will miss them when they have left my stead.

So with much exhaustion, a few tears, and a great sense of pride in my students who have stretched farther than they believed they could do so that I end the school year. They, along with scores of other graduates, will walk down the aisle, receive their diplomas, and exit their institutions to enter the world.

To those graduates: remember that education is not over. Your instructors may be exhausted and you may be graduated, but education is never over. And as American jurist Paul Freund once said, “At commencement you wear your square-shaped mortarboards. My hope is that from time to time you will let your minds be bold, and wear sombreros.”