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A blast from public-school past

Filed under: Imported

Last May, I did a blog entry on a deeply disturbing graduation ceremony that I attended. I still get an occasional email or link because of it. You can read it here, if you're interested.

In going through some old doc files tonight (looking for a particular one that I never did find, of course), I came across a companion piece for that earlier one. It's actually from a pair of emails I sent to friends at the time, describing another public-school outrage that I was forced to sit through. Here they are.

The day before, I wrote:

Tomorrow night, I go to my youngest daughter's middle school to see her get an award for being on the honor roll-- her and about 500 others.

This year, the DSM schools lowered the necessary GPA to 2.0. In her case, only half her day is spent at this school-- the other half is at the city's brain academy, where she earns college credit for the classes she takes. So this straight-A kid is on the same "honor" roll with some little fuck-off in the basic track who gets all Cs? Why not just make it a Halloween party, and give honor roll status to every kid who wears a costume?

The day after, I wrote:

Well, I found out I really wasn't making a joke at all when I said that she'd be in a group of 500 others-- it was actually 472, out of a total of 800 in the school.

What an outrage this thing was! Because the academic bar had been lowered to near floor level, there wasn't a hall in the school big enough to seat everyone, so it was held in the gym of a nearby business college (which got a nice ass-kissing thank-you from the principal). Because there were so many of us, the kids were told that they wouldn't be getting any of their award stuff until the next day, at school. (Mine only went because she wanted to get the T-shirt.) Instead, they just had their names read (all 472!), and when they heard theirs, each of the honored got to stand up for half a second and bask in the adoration. Best of all, the kids with the 4.0 GPAs (like mine) were saved for very last, so when their turn finally came, a good portion of the crowd had either already left or were getting ready to.

All of this "honoring" only occurred after an hour-long speech by some former ISU coach who's now pimping his current employer, the Iowa Games (he mentioned them countless times). At an event that was supposed to be about academic achievement, the DSM schools gave these kids an hour-long speech by a coach about sports! For the first third of his wandering inspiratorial, he talked about himself. For the other two-thirds (or, at least, the parts I remained sufficiently awake to hear) it was about stuff that other coaches had told him, anecdotes about "Chubby Chucky" and people who might have sent kids to school with holes in their clothes. Neither was a a topic that won him any friends in this crowd, for painfully apparent reasons, and whose boredom should have been obvious even to this self-loving dolt. One story ended with a guy on a bus giving a poor woman his shoes, and he ended it by saying, "The name of that boy was . . . " and he named a sports guy I'd never heard of; I was expecting him to say "Jesus Christ."

Fortunately, the most insulted by this bullshit-- the kids who work the hardest, every day-- are also the ones who take a slap in the face like this the least seriously, because even at their young age, they can clearly see that they're being had. After fleeing the scene of the crime, we went out to dinner and had a long laugh at what a farce it had been. Later, I heard on the news that DSM schools are going to have even less money to spend, and that the only cuts they can make are in the classrooms. So perhaps next year, everybody will be on the honor roll, and the keynote speaker will be from McDonald's, who�ll talk about how great it is to punch pictures on a cash register.

Posted by Steve Monaco at January 21, 2004 10:28 PM

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