Some random high school graduation comments

I've already made one.

Sharp Dressing

One comment or post related to high school graduation that is.  That one pertained to dress, and it's here:

Swing of the Pendulum? Lex Anteinternet: The Collapse of the Standard of Dress. Maybe not so fast?

That one noted how well dressed graduating seniors are presently.  A few more.

Ronald McDonald Hair

Long hair among boys is clearly back, and I really dislike it.

It's odd to see, and I haven't only been seeing it in this context.  But boys wearing long hair has really made a comeback.  And the style I'm seeing a lot of is really poofy, as in Ronald McDonald poofy.  It looks just silly.

It might look slightly better than the "man bun", I suppose, which recalls Medieval Japanese coiffures.  But only slightly.

Oddly, a type of poofy hair style was in when I graduated, and that's a long time ago.  Then, as now, it was a subset of males that affected it.  I think the percentage is higher now than then, and it's a bit different now. The poofy style is better now, as opposed to then, but it doesn't look good, and it didn't then.

No Outside Speakers.

There's been some graduations without an outside speaker.

I'm okay with that.

It's been the standard for eons to have an invited speaker.  I've seen some good ones.  I saw, for example, one of our former Governors deliver an excellent commencement speech.  And I saw one delivered by a former Vice President of the United States that was also excellent.  But I've sat through some poor ones.

One of the worst ones I've ever sat through was my law school classes'.  It was awful.

And my high school speech was delivered by the then current University of Wyoming football coach.  I'm not sure why a football coach is even generally interesting.  He delivered an okay speech but his resignation as coach shortly thereafter left an ironic note to it.

The speeches I've seen this year were delivered by the students themselves and they've been very good.

We can't get through a graduation without food?

While I've praised the poise and attire of the graduating students, the standards that apply to the viewing audiences are a bit of a contrast.

One event I went to was held at the local large events center, which is run by the city and which serves concession type food.  Surprisingly, they had their concession stands open during the graduation ceremony and even more surprisingly a big group of adults in front of me bought a lot of nacho chips.

There's something really odd about buying nacho chips to watch a graduation.

Dressing Rural

On attire, another thing that continues to take me off guard, oddly enough, is the commonality of "western wear" or rural type clothing among the nearly rural or non rural.

When I was that age, there was a sharp divide on those lines.  Kids from ranches wore their ranch clothing, including their cowboy hats, into town and school.  Kids from town did not affect that clothing style save, to some extent, some who wore cowboy boots.  Now that's all changed.  There are quite a few kids from just outside of town in the rural subdivisions and near subdivisions who dress in that fashion and even some from town.

Perhaps providing a line on that, however, a recent branding demonstrated to me that the ones really from ranches wear short, short hair.  See above re poofy hair, which is affected by some of the others.  Long hair in a dirty work is really a pain.

To offer career advice or hold your tongue

I've wondered what to say to recent graduates, if anything at all.

That is in the category of self initiated speech.

For a lot of reasons, recently the irony of the film The Graduate, which I've actually never seen, has been coming to mind.

As noted, I've never seen the movie, but the basic plot of it is well known to anyone my age.  In the film a young Dustin Hoffman returns home after graduating from university.  In the 1960s, when the movie was filmed and the book written, simply having a university degree meant you could enter the white collar world.  It doesn't mean that now.

Anyhow, upon returning home he's confronted by the nature of his World War Two generation parents and their friends and what is shown to be their hypocrisy in all sorts of ways.  One of the bits of unsolicited advice the young graduate receives is that he should go to work in the field of "Plastics".

Of course, the real irony of the film is that the advice to go into plastics turns out to have been pretty good advice, in retrospect.  Beyond that, the ironies further abound. The generation that's portrayed as rejecting the material work world in fact embraced it in spades and spends all sorts of energy today dumping on Gen X and Millennials for not doing so.

Plastics.

Well, be that as it may, at least in my actual experience, which didn't come from the 1960s but rather the very late 1970s and early 1980s, it was really hard to get that WWII generation to give advice on careers.  Maybe that's because they'd been so beat up by the generation that came of age in the 1960s.  Of course, the final irony is that same generation that dumped on them in the 1960s  had decided that their parents were The Greatest Generation by the 1990s.  Go figure.

Anyhow, in looking around, when you know graduating people do you say anything to them about their expressed career goals, if you know them, and aren't asked to venture an opinion, if you have unique insight into them?

I haven't as a rule.  Looking back people generally didn't do that when I was that age, unless they were teachers or professors.  I sort of wish that they had. But I haven't either.  I can think of several instances in which I was tempted to say something, and in both cases I still could, but so far I haven't.

Guess I'm like my folks that way and not saying anything.

Plastics.

The Depth of Cultural Knowledge

Speaking of old movies and whatnot, I'm pretty surprised by the depth of cultural knowledge on stuff that's old.

I don't mean the results of the Treaty of Ghent, or things of that type (although in looking at the history section for IB diplomas I've been stunned by how extremely in depth the tested area is. . . as in university level quite frankly), but rather on things from films and music that are old.

One high school here chose Toto's Africa as their graduating song, although the back story is that it was a joke.  Be that as it may, it says something that current graduates are familiar with a song that was released the year I graduated from high school.

Even more surprising, indeed really surprising, was the excellent delivery of the song To Sir, With Love, at a graduation ceremony.

I'm familiar with the song and the movie its from, but I'm flat out stunned that any current high schooler does.



The movie, a tribute to a high school teacher in a role he didn't desire to be in, in a working class English high school, is a real classic, but it came out in 1967 and it's not as if its on twenty four hours a day like Pretty Woman or something.  I'm just amazed.

To put this in context, if somebody had sung an equally old song at my high school graduation, it would have been from 1929.  I'm pretty certain that hardly anyone, if anyone at all, in my high school graduating class would have been aware of a song from 1929.

I've looked up popular songs from 29, and I know a few of them. . . now.  In 1981?  Probably not.

Shoot, if an equally old song as that of Africa had been the class graduating song for my class, it would have been from 1943.  Back at that time I did know some music from the 1940s, but I don't know most of Billboard's Top 100 for 43 now, and I can't see my class having adopted, let's say, Don't Get Around Much Anymore as the class song.

Party!

The institution of the graduation party continues to surprise me.

It surprised me when a few years ago, when I went through the first round of these, and it continues to.

When I graduated here, in 1981, people didn't get parties.  Indeed, I know that most of us graduated on a Saturday and went to work in summer jobs that following Monday.

The anxiety of being a parent doesn't abate.

Maybe it's that it doesn't abate for me.

It's really odd to think of, but when this blog started I had two grade school aged children.  Now I have two adult children.

I don't know that I found the grade school years to be that stressful, but infancy in some ways was.  I think the stress of being a parent notches up when they hit middle school and it definitely does when they hit high school.  And it keeps on keeping on when they're in college.

I'm not sure how to explain that and a lot of that may be really personal to the author.  I know that I left high school for an uncertain future in college which seemed to stretch out as a long process for which I faced dubious prospects of success, at least in my own mind.  I don't know why I felt that way, but I did.  I know that I commented to one of my close friends at the time that I doubted that I'd make it through college, and he was stunned.  He commented back that he was sure that I would, and that if anyone wouldn't, it'd be him.  He was right.  He didn't, I did.

In fact I really hit my stride in college and loved it.  Maybe too much as I learned later that my father was worried that I was developing the inclination to be a professional student as studying geology took me five years (which was common, actually, it wasn't possible to line up the classes in a manner so that you could take everything in four) and then went on to law school.  But that's part of the stress.  I can look back now and see it was like getting on a train and that train led right to a narrowing set of career options and practically dictated my entire post education life.

I don't mean for that to sound like a complaint, and it isn't, but what's clear is that by the time I had finished my education my opportunities hadn't opened up, they'd shut down. They'd closed in a manner in which I could and have made a living, but frankly it was in a field in which I knew almost nothing about the daily nature of it at all.  Less than nothing, really.

That scares me as in retrospect I can see now how little anyone knows about what they're really going to do. . .maybe.  And as a parent you hope and pray it all works out.  You hope that people enter a field that the pointless evolution of technology and the economy doesn't make obsolete, you hope that it pays enough to make a decent living at in a place you want to make a living in, and you hope at the same time that people like and enjoy what they do.  In the back of your mind you know, looking back, that it was at that age that you first met people whom there was some concept, perhaps far back in your mind, that you would consider building a future life with, and if you are like me, you also feel the hand of Providence making some of those things not work out, for which you are thankful now.

Indeed, one of the oddities of looking back is both the sense of being somewhat lost at the time, but also that people were really themselves to a higher degree, which likely doesn't make sense.

What I mean by that is that at that time, in some odd way, before our careers begin to mold us into somebody else, we're about as close to who we really are possible, while at the same time afflicted by the height of affectation for some people.  Later on, careers make people into somebody else, to at least a degree. The lucky ones with strong personalities remain who they really are, but contend with that "occupational identify" for the most part. Some with extremely strong personalities don't experience that at all.  But a lot of people become what their career make them and never escape it.  Men who were cowboys and outdoorsmen in their youths become totally assumed into their office jobs and the like.

At the same time, a lot of the time, you just don't realize that and feel like you are meandering, because to perhaps some extent, you are.

Well, in the words of the sage Bueller, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."