I was born and bred in the city of Sheffield in the county of Yorkshire in the kingdom of England (see also the note at the end of this story). When I was around 30 years old, I moved to Huntsville, Alabama, USA (I came here for the nightlife ... that's a little Alabama joke :-)
Since I've been here (in America), I've attended quite a few high school graduation ceremonies and I've come to wish that we had had this sort of thing when I was young.
For those who aren't familiar with this concept, let me explain... When kids successfully finish the twelfth grade at high school in America (they are typically around 18 years old) they are said to graduate. As part of this they have a graduation ceremony.
The last such ceremony I attended was a couple of years ago for Holly, who is the daughter of some friends of mine. Holly's graduating class comprised around 1,000 students (that's the number of kids in her year). When you add in parents, siblings, grandparents, and family friends (like me), this is a big bunch of folks, so they hold the graduating ceremony in the Von Braun Civic Center, which is the largest venue around these parts (each high school in the area has its graduating ceremony on a separate evening).
This is a jolly big event. You get speeches by folks like the principle of the school saying things like "You are the future, the world is yours, go forth and make us all proud." You may also get speeches of the same ilk from the mayor and other local dignitaries. And you are also regaled with speeches by the students in the form valedictorian and salutatorian, who are the highest and second-highest academically ranked students in the graduating class, respectively.
It's all rather moving really, especially the part about the "world being your mollusk" and "you are the next generation of leaders" and stuff like that.
It was a bit different when I graduated from Abbeydale Grange School in Sheffield in 1975. (This used to be called Abbeydale Boys' Grammar School when I first crossed its threshold when I was eleven years old.) In those days, the senior year took a set of final exams called A Levels. Each student could potentially be taking a different combination of courses (I was taking Math, Physics, Chemistry, and Social Studies).
Also, the various exams started and ended at different times on different days. This meant that when you finished one of your exams, other students might still be taking theirs. Similarly, when you completed your final exam, some of your friends might still have exams later that day or later that week.
The end result was that leaving high school was something of an anticlimax. I remember finishing my last exam (although I can no longer recall the subject), laying my pen down, and thinking: "Wow, that's it!" The teacher wandered up and down the aisles between the desks picking up the papers. And then we (the students in this particular subject group) gathered our belongings and walked out into the sunshine.
We all stood around for a while chatting in a rather desultory fashion. Then we looked at each other, said "good luck", shook hands, and wandered off in different directions to go home leaving school for the very last time.
And that was it ... no speeches ... no "you are the heros of the future" ... nothing...
In fact, apart from a couple of particularly close friends, I didn't see the vast majority of these folks until someone organized a 25th reunion a quarter of a century later.
Now, to be fair, way back in those days of yore when I was 18, I was a bit of a rebel; for example, I wore black corduroy pants (trousers in the UK) rather than the official black school uniform pants (yes, I know, I was "a rebel without a clue"). I'm sure that the thought of a graduation ceremony would have been something I and my friends would have moaned-and-groaned about at the time. However, looking back now after almost 35 years, I really wish we'd had one...
Additional Info: The difference between England, Britain, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom can be a little confusing at first. Here's the deal: England and Scotland are kingdoms; Wales is a principality. Britain refers to the combination of England and Wales; Great Britain is the combination of Britain and Scotland (that is, Great Britain is the combination of the kingdoms of England and Scotland and the principality of Wales); and the United Kingdom (UK), which is short for The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, refers to the combination of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales.
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