My Daughter, The Graduate
Tomorrow my daughter graduates from sixth grade. She has picked out her skirt and blouse that she will wear. She has practiced the songs her class will sing. She is excited.
I am excited for her. She has had some great teachers this year. The regular teachers, however, have turned into raging bulls the last two months, threatening the class with not being able to move on to seventh grade if they don’t do better.
I am pissed a bit that they did away with recess for the sixth grade to prepare them for seventh grade. And yet when the end of year testing comes around, and the school is graded on how well the student test scores come in, the classes go for runs, play kickball, and do all kinds of outdoor activities before the tests. Hmm. Seems if they had recess all year it would help their brains then too, don’t you think?
My daughter is afraid that I will shed a tear and embarrass her. I told her I would try not to. And as I look back at these last years, the trials, the tribulations, the joys, the one thing that keeps coming to my mind? I got gypped. I NEVER got a sixth grade graduation. Son-of-a-bitch.
Filed under: Life Lessons, Family
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Neither did I. But I didn’t get recess either.
I DO remember 6th grade being the first year I started watching porn, though. Porn, porn, porn. I probably watched more porn in sixth grade than I have in all the years since.
I think we should get recess at work. I’m dead serious about that too. That’s the great thing about the college years, which I consider the freest years of your life. You make your own schedule. If you want to schedule breaks between your classes, you can. Or if, like me, you only want to take classes two days a week so you can work the other three, and then only work part time and come and go as you please, you can. Cause you’re in college, and you’re the boss. That freedom gets yanked away when you graduate into the “real world”.
I think maybe you should walk and sit next to her during 6th grade graduation, so you can both experience. I’m sure she’d love that.
The thing I remember most about 6th grade graduation was planning all the things I wanted to do: sex, drinking, smoking, drugs. Of course, none of those came until AFTER high school graduation.