Ten Years Ago, or, Random Thoughts About the End of the School Year

The end of the school year always makes me think about when I was student. I graduated from high school ten years ago, which makes me completely ancient to the little kids at the middle school. Today at school, the little sixth grade girl was looking at the newspaper and, for some reason, ended up looking at the obituaries. She pointed out one woman and made the sign for "old," but she inflected it to make the sign mean "extremely old/ancient." I thought she was going to show me some woman who had lived to be 98 years old or something but she pointed out a lady who had been born in 1944. The other deaf student and I started to tease her, both of us saying that 65 is not "ancient" old, sure it may be old, but to inflect the sign for "old" like that was not appropriate. I guess to a twelve year old, 65 IS ancient.

Today when I was leaving the building I ran into one of the deaf ed teachers from the elementary school (they have three in their building). This particular teacher's husband is a teacher in my building and she was dropping their son off on her way to an appointment. Apparently it was their little boy's last day of school (kindergarten) and he was sobbing about school being done for the year. I'm pretty sure that none of the middle school students will be as upset come Thursday. I'm also sure that no matter how much the tweens are anticipating summer vacation, EVERY staff member in the school is anticipating it a thousand times more than the students are. I don't remember wishing for summer vacation when I was student. I know I was glad that I had a break from assignments but I always liked school and I didn't want to be apart from my friends for three months. Now that I actually work in a school, I live for summer vacation. I LOVE having three months off. I like being able to sleep in (although for me sleeping in means not getting up until 8:30, maybe 9:00, instead of my usual 6:00 a.m.), I like being able to sit around and read books or watch movies or play on the computer for as long as I want, I like being able to go on trips and not have to feel guilty about missing school because there are no subs available for interpreters in my district, I like the freedom of not having a schedule.

However, if one was ever to ask me if I didn't like my job or working with the kids or wished to do something else, I would say, "Heck no." I love what I do. That doesn't mean that I don't appreciate a break every now and again, but I do enjoy my job.

One thing I liked about the last day of school when I was a kid was that our bus driver always brought popsicles for the kids on her bus route. That was pretty awesome.

The kids have been taking their district-wide end of the year tests the past few days. The kids hate the tests for the obvious reason that they're cumulative and therefore difficult. I hate the tests because they're always chock full of typos, leading me to wonder what kind of incompetent heads of departments think it's okay to expect the students to perform well on tests that are full of grammatical, editorial, and other errors. For example, this year's sixth grade science final repeats several questions verbatim, taking them from one page and then putting them on a page further into the test. One would think that that would mean easy points for the students; if they've already answered it once, they should be able to answer it again. But I just see sixth grade students who are frustrated by the time they get to question forty and don't realize they've seen that same question three pages ago. Not to mention that if a student did remember seeing that question before, it's possible that he answered it incorrectly the first time and will answer it incorrectly the second time, thus losing double the points.

Speaking of finals, I'll never forget the time I wrecked the curve for the class on a French final. Our teacher was going to grade the exam on a curve, which almost never happened at my school no matter how much certain students begged for it. She had to tell the class that she decided not to curve our test grades because one student earned a 103 on her test. Sorry, guys. When I was in high school, I was often exempt from most of my finals. A lot of our teachers wouldn't make us take the final if we already had an A in the class and our school had a policy that students could be exempt from one final exam for each grading period of perfect attendance (up to two finals per semester). I always opted out of my science or math finals. I mean, who really wants to take a calculus final? Yuck. French (I through III) was one of the easiest subjects I've ever taken, so naturally, I always opted to take the final in there.

I also took two years of German when I was in high school. Of course, my trusty sidekick, the Snicklefritz, in her pre-Snicklefritz days, was with me. This morning I randomly thought of one of the great tragedies of our high school careers... As I've mentioned, I was exempt from most of my final exams, so when I was senior I had close to a week off between the last day of official classes and graduation because all of the other grades were taking their finals during that week. Sis and I went into the school a few times during the week for graduation rehearsal, various end of year things, etc., and it was on one of those trips into the school that we found out that the facilitator of our German class had thrown out our final German project. We took German class through a satellite feed from Kentucky, so all of our projects and tests were mailed to the teacher and then sent back to us at the school. Our final project that year was to put together a calendar of German-related things, so Sis and I pulled the only all-nighter of our high school careers and created a calendar featuring famous German athletes. I can't even remember all of them, but I know we included Michael Schumacher, Steffi Graf, Boris Becker, and Katarina Witt. We were so ticked when we went into the school that day and the lady who was responsible for mailing our schoolwork to the teacher in Kentucky told us that she had received the graded calendar and then thrown it out because we weren't at school that week and she "didn't think that we would want it back." Ten years later and my blood pressure still rises when I think about it. Sorry Sis, to bring up the bad memory of that experience.