I attended a high school graduation on Saturday. I’ve had dental appointments that were more enjoyable.
Speaker after speaker after speaker, all long-winded, and all peppered with trite expressions, random quotations, and lazy cliches.
I kept hoping the orchestra would ‘play them off’ like they do on awards shows.
Oh yeah…and entire families who whoop for attention when their community college-bound beloved’s name is announced after having been specifically requested to hold all applause until the end.
I’ve never been to a large HS graduation, but I have been to large college graduations. The largest schools have two ceremonies. One with speeches & en masse, by group stand up & move your tassel. This is quite boring the tenth time in a row as they do it for each college & degree (Bachelors vs. Masters vs. Doctorates). Then when that is done, you go somewhere else, where it’s just the graduate’s school (as opposed to the whole university) & get to sit thru more speeches & one-by-one name calling as they come up on stage to get their diploma.
For my cousin’s graduation from something, and I swore I’d never go to another. I’ve refused to be guilted into it by family, and frankly, they don’t have much leverage considering I’ve never gone to one of my own. I have much better things to do with my time.
Yes, a college graduation. (Cue Groucho Marx here Horse Feathers (1/9) Movie CLIP - I'm Against It (1932) HD - YouTube ) . But seriously, my son’s commencement was held 2 years ago at ATT park. I thought, cool! Beer, hot dogs, and they get to run around the bases at the end and slide into home plate!
Oh no. it was FIVE HOURS of fucking unbelievably longwinded boring speeches, ALL OF WHICH WERE READ DIRECTLY FROM THE COMMENCEMENT ANNOUNCEMENT!
From this I know that our son either loves us dearly (parents must be allowed to attend useless ceremonies) or wanted to formally jab us one last time.
Try being a trombone player in the band, that has to play quarter notes for the entirety of “Pomp and Circumstance” during the entire roll call of the class as they go across the stage. AND listen to all the speakers. And do it for three years straight (thankfully we’re excused from playing our senior year).
At least we get to sit down for that. Standing and playing the alma mater over and over for the homecoming court at the homecoming game is the second worst day of the band year.
Ceremonies in general are tedious, and graduation ceremonies are among the tediousest. Fortunately, the one I went to on Saturday wasn’t as bad as it could have been; it was relatively brief, with no commencement speaker as such. But yeah, what there was, was dull as dishwater.
Sorry, I think that requests to “hold all applause until the end” are bullshit. If graduating really is an accomplishment worth celebrating, as the ceremony suggests, then surely each graduate deserves a few seconds of personal applause. And for the audience, the applause and cheering make sitting through the recitation of hundreds of strangers’ names slightly more interesting.
I’ve seen my kids graduate from both high school and college. College was worse, except for the quality of the musicians playing Pomp and Circumstance. In three college graduations the only bright spot was one valedictorian speech where the speaker mentioned that her internship was great and she was supposed to get a permanent job there, but the company went bankrupt and so if anyone knew of any openings, please let her know after the ceremony.
“Graduations” from middle school are worse than either.
Well if they tell people to hold applause, they know it might hold the whooping down to a few seconds. If you don’t put on some constraint, there are loads of inconsiderate families who will go on and on and others won’t even get to hear their graduate’s name over the din.
One of the things I am eternally grateful for since I no longer work for a Technical College is that I don’t have any more mandates on me to attend the stupid graduation ceremony twice a year. I’d rather get a root canal. People bring every crying baby and drunk relative, and they jump around and act like getting that Nursing Assistant Certificate to go be an underpaid shift worker in a retirement home is the equivalent of a Yale Law Degree.
College graduations are worse. I didn’t go to any of my three or my wife’s two after high school. However, I’m a college professor, so I’ve been to all too many of them.
I think the worst one was when it was raining so we moved it indoors to the hockey rink (no more ice of course). Th faculty sat behind the speakers facing the audience. The acoustics were so bad in the area that we couldn’t even be distracted by the speeches because we coudln’t understand anything sitting there.
One reason to discourage applause for individual graduates is that some have a lot of family and friends in attendance, and so they get a lot of applause, while there are others who literally have no one there for them. And actually, when my niece graduated, we applauded for the one kid with a long, complex Nigerian name, mostly in appreciation of the principal for getting his name right.
Perhaps in their family it is. Lots of people start at the bottom rather than being born on second base thinking they hit a double and they deserve to be recognized as much as anyone else. I’d think someone working at a vocational school would understand that better than many.
As I’ve always understood it, the intent is to move the graduates through as fast as possible b/c that’s the sole reason most people are there; stopping for a ten second hoot and holler every other name slows the whole shebang down.
I had the honor of going through what was and still is considered the worst graduation ceremony in my towns history ………
it started off on a sour note 3 weeks before graduation even began
See back when I graduated it became popular to fling frisbees and bounce beach balls about which happened the previous year and irritated the administration
So they marched every senior into a an assembly and dictated what we would and would not do and exactly how we would or not do it in no uncertain terms meaning no balls or Frisbees or anything remotely amusing we were there to "sit down shut up and listen to speeches and the like "
The student council saw red and took out the 600 dollars that they had left for the year …….
Also there was a change of time and venue graduation was to be held at the fair grounds grandstand across the street on the 13th of june
Now we’re a town that’s pretty much the edge of the Mojave high desert and in june triple digit heat is the norm …
we had 2 whole days of “practice” in 100 degree heat from 10 am to 2:30 pm The first day was nothing but confusion and about 200 hot sweaty 17-19 year olds what made it worse was there were no liquids provided other than a little juice cup a little box of milk with the 2 degrees above mouldy left overs that was lunch ….the treasurer who had the 600 still was setting it up for a local restaurant to cater lunch and they told her no she couldn’t do that……….
Meanwhile there was a kerfuffle over how many tickets each family could have per student …………
So after finding out about the refreshments during graduation the people in charge of the money voted and went out and bought every banned item on the list frisbees silly string airhorns beach balls and handed them out to the entire graduating class
To make matters worse What No one knew was the soundsystem the school was using wasn’t meant for outside ….So no one could hear anything ,names were called out wrong it was hot and windy kids let loose with the items …… It was so bad that peoples relatives from out of state wrote into the local paper for like weeks about it …….
the treasurer was interviewed and gave our side and people said it wasn’t the students fault mostly as we were just trying to make a miserable experience bearable
They made several changes for the next year mostly liked ….
Oh poo. You have no idea the kind of crapola I had to put up with from “people who deserve to be recognized as much as anyone else”. And I am perfectly willing to help anybody who has to start at the bottom, that’s beside the point. I could write PAGES about my experiences that you wouldn’t want to read anyway.
One of the problems with our graduation ceremonies was that they allowed all graduates of all levels to be in the same ceremony. So people who were getting Associate Degrees were lumped in with those getting a 6 week certificate, and the latter were the ones ruining it for the former. Nobody is saying all those GED and Certificate folks shouldn’t be recognized, but they should have had their own ceremony.
I don’t care where you start, you can still have manners and courtesy, and as mind-numbingly boring as a graduation can be it shouldn’t be allowed to devolve into a free for all. And in some schools it will unless you set some boundaries.
And you are right about the need to keep things moving, so yes they have to keep calling names. So do you suggest that the Dean pause and wait for each family to decide they are done? You’ll be in there another 4 hours. Got any sympathy for the families who couldn’t hear their graduate’s name called because other folks wouldn’t shaddap?
My class was famous for a few years because the baddest boy in our class was not allowed to walk. He had the grades and class hours, but he had several disciplinary things on his record. One not so slouchy of punching the Principal in the nose at lunch one day. He streaked across the football field buck naked at the spot where his name would have been called. It was magnificent. So yea, kids can be bad and still stand out in a crowd. I think he’s in the penitentiary now.