Yesterday we held our graduation ceremony for the graduating seniors from our school. More than once I found myself teary-eyed during the ceremony. Listening to the students talk about their futures, seeing the pride and joy in faces of the parents, siblings, grandparents, and other family members, and seeing our faculty members supporting these students during their final K-12 experience was at times overwhelming.
Okay — yes, I am also a very sensitive Pisces, but that’s beside the point. The point is that yesterday we graduated a few hundred young people who are now off on their next adventures in life. I watched a few hundred students walk across the stage to receive their diplomas and I felt so happy for these students. For these students we (the teachers, the system, the community) were successful. We succeed in helping them achieve this goal of high school graduation.
Yesterday I also said goodbye to a handful of students with whom I worked closely during the school year. I was fortunate this past year to teach a small group of students, and as always, whenever I spend any time in the classroom I am reminded of why our work is so very important. I will miss these students and I can only hope that I said something to them this year that makes a difference to them at some point in the future. I hope that some of the lessons we learned together in class will help them be more successful in their careers, college, or other post-secondary experiences. (I also hope that at some point in the future they get over the trauma of all of the drafts and rewrites of their semester-long term paper!)
I was reminded yesterday that the vast majority of students don’t make it to graduation on their own. Successful navigation of the K-12 path requires a great deal of collaborative effort on the part of teachers, administrators, parents, and community members. It does take all of us. And at every high school graduation ceremony we can all celebrate a job well-done!
Change Agency by Stephanie Sandifer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. You may copy, distribute, transmit and/or remix this content for noncommercial uses as long as you attribute the work to Stephanie Sandifer (with link back to the original post) and agree to license the work under the same or similar license.
