#Graduation Pomp and Circumstance Part 1

Graduation at Point Loma Nazarene - 2019

Most schools graduated last month, will graduate this week, or will graduate next week. This is a two-part post on graduation ceremonies "as I see it." 

The recording of Edward Elgar directing Pomp and Circumstance Marche No.1 is the “go to” music for just about any school graduation. I don’t know why?

The rest of this blog has nothing to do with marching. However, I will reference P&C again.

I started teaching high school in 1973. Protesting was the national pastime for many students. Graduation ceremonies, even high school graduation ceremonies, were targets. While many of the protests were ideological in theory, many were times for people to do things they “had the right to do”—even if they didn’t have that right.

I’m not a fan of graduation ceremonies. I remember 
My 8th-grade graduation (1964) more from photographs than from RNA pathways. It’s probably because I got an award.

My high school graduation (1968). I was the closer on a 5-part valedictory address.

My college graduation from San Diego State (1972) in Aztec Bowl—now a parking structure—for two reasons. 

• First, Pauline Frederick was the speaker. Her speech was anti-Vietnam War biased and did not go over well at a university in San Diego, California. 
• Second, my wife came down to the field after the ceremony. I split as fast as I could because there was nobody between me and my car. Since cell phones were sci-fi then, she didn’t know I’d left, and I didn’t know she’d come down. Forty minutes later, my parents pulled into our driveway and asked where Leanne was. I hot-footed it back to SDSU and found her waiting on the sidewalk with a kind passerby who waited with her.

I remember the graduation ceremony for my Ph.D., only because I got to wear a snazzy outfit known as regalia.

Faculty attendance at Monte Vista High School graduations was optional in 1974, 75, and 76. We had a nude motorcyclist speed around the track at one of those, but nothing else of consequence happened that I remember.

In 1977, beachballs and tortillas filled the air during the ceremony. The administration requested that all faculty members sit with the students to, “emphasize the academic nature of the event.”

“You mean, you want us to be police,” I said.

They held to the party line. 

“When you admit that we’re police, I’ll go down on the field.” 

For the next 18-years stood at the top of the stairs next to what was then “the wrestling room” during graduation ceremonies. I was the “door monitor.” Students had to return the robes because the school rented them for the occasion. 

My job was to keep students from entering the wrestling room with the robes on because, once inside the room, they had to throw the robe in a cardboard box and pick up their diploma. Disrobing in the room would have seriously disrupted the flow.

End of the graduation ceremony at Monte Vista High - 1984
Principal Pat Carroll is to the lower left in a sport coat and tie. More on him next week.

I enjoyed doing that for two reasons.

I talk about those reasons and finish graduating next week.