Today I heard the second instance this month of a parent saying their child is being promoted, rather than graduating. This one was high school, the previous was grade school.
Is this happening places other than Chicago-area? Someone want to suggest why this is anything other than stupid?
On edit - Google indicates this has happened for several years. This year was the first I had heard of it; same for the parents involved as well.
I’ve understood promoted to be used when going from one grade to the next, and graduate when schooling is complete, like from highschool. Never promoted from highschool.
My end-of-year report cards from 1979-1983 were always stamped with “PROMOTED” (in allcaps). Between schools, you graduate and get a diploma. Between grades, you get promoted.
Of course, it’s possible I got a special stamp just to make me feel better.
Yeah, being “promoted” from grade to grade seems to me to be an old-fashioned terminology. Herman Wouk’s “City Boy” set in the 1920s talks about kids being “promoted” to higher grades, for example.
That was the term used for ‘moving on from one grade to the next’ in all the old-fashioned American kids’ books I read when I was little.
could be a Chicago thing. It wasn’t until SiriusXM paired Chicago and Detroit on their traffic channels that I learned you call people who slow down to look at an accident “gapers.”
My son’s elementary school was K-5th. I believe they had “Fifth Grade Promotion” before leaving that school for one of the various middle schools (6th-8th) or secondary schools (6th-12th). I think that’s what they called it. I know it was not called graduation and they did not wear gowns or anything.
Graduating from anything but your senior year of high school is new. “Promoted” was from one grade to another up through the eighth grade, when you were simply promoted to high school, where your class standing was decided by credits earned. I had a friend who wanted to graduate early, and took some summer classes and correspondence courses, and was a senior according to her credits by the second semester of her third year. At the end of her third year, she graduated.
People who skipped a grade were sometimes called “double-promoted.”
Now they have robes and mortarboards for kindergarteners. You graduate every year, and your senior year is less special.
I joined the Promotion Committee when my kid went from Elementary to Middle school. NEVER heard that term before & the committee members had to constantly remind me not to call it graduation. Now she is promoting from Middle School to High School, but here in Southern California, graduation from high school is still called graduation.
Yeah, same here. I “graduated” twice in my life: once from high school and once from college.
when I was little (1980-81) we had a “graduation” from kindergarten.
We had robes and hats and diploma-handing-out ceremony for kindergarten graduation…in 1987. While that might be considered relatively new, it’s not like it’s just the last few years. We also had a 6th grade graduation, with valedictorian. That’s a little iffier, though since our school at the time had separate administration offices and a high school principal and elementary school principal even though it was all on one campus. Has since merged into just one (when I was in high school, IIRC), but I think they still do kindergarten and sixth grade graduations.
My sister is the most “graduated” person I know. She has had the following graduations (called graduations, not called promotions):
Preschool
Kindergarten
6th grade (from elementary to secondary school)
8th grade (from middle school to high schoo)
High school
College (BA)
College (MLIS)
The 6th and 8th grade double up were because we moved. She graduated from high school in 1990 so that tells you how long ago this nonsense was going on.
I, on the other hand, only graduated from high school and college. We’re only 3 years apart.
Same, except it was 1988 in my case.
I’ve always seen “promoted” and “graduated” used as most posters above describe.
When I completed elementary school (6th grade), there was another term for that, more pretentious than “promoted”, but less pretentious than “graduated”. That was in 1963, and now I don’t remember what the word was. Perhaps it will come to me in the middle of the night eventually.
ETA: Okay, poking through some on-line thesauri, I found it: My 6th grade ceremonies (yes, we had a sorta-graduation-like ceremony) was called “commencement”.
Ditto. '83.
My report cards K-8 always had “promoted to” on the last report card of the year. Not so in high school, and then I graduated. I think this was a coommon thing in the 50s and 60s. I lived in Chicago.
My kids “graduated” from kindergarten, complete with homemade construction-paper and yarn “mortar boards”.
I gave my daughter a bouquet and my son a video game.
My mistake - both instances were from 8th grade to HS. Both parents said it was a new thing. My understanding is that it is supposed to dissuade some families from making such a big deal out of it.
I went to K-8, and we had graduation ceremonies back in the early 70s. My kids went to K-5, then middle school for 6-8. I don’t remember any ceremonies after grade school, but they had graduation ceremonies after 8th. This was in the early 00s.
From what I saw on-line, in many locations this is a relatively recent (last decade or so) change with the intention I suggested above.)
Sounds like someone who had been held back, and then finally “promoted”.