My Favorite Week of the Year
In a Year Unlike Any Other
This third week of May is generally my favorite week of the year.
In any normal year, it is the bittersweet nature of the week that appeals to me: wrapping up major assessments, the week culminates in graduation and a moment to reflect on so many accomplishments.
A Five-week Sprint
At my school, the sprint to Memorial Day starts in April.
In the third week of April, seniors attend their final week of classes. With mounting excitement, the senior class learn a final few lessons, review some final concepts, and, day-by-day, look forward to never having to follow the six periods a day, five days a week high school schedule ever again.
In the final week of April, seniors attend review sessions for their upcoming IB exams, cumulative exams assessing their learning in each two-year course. The students come in for an hour or two each day for a final review session and start to get the sense that, actually, they did learn something over the past two years.
Often, this review is the last time I need to play teacher with the seniors. Over the course of the next few weeks, as students come and go between exams, a series of friendly conversations unfold. We chat a little about what college is really like, about what teachers really thought of their class, and, finally, one student always asks, in a halting manner, “after we graduate, can we call you . . . Mark?”
In the first week of May, IB exams start. The first day, students are understandably nervous. Not only is this a high-stakes exam, with college credit, scholarships, even admission on the line, but they just don’t know what to expect.
But by the second week of May, taking the IB exams becomes familiar to the students. And they start to gain some comfort and pride from knowing what they know. At times, it’s almost underwhelming for them: they know which option to choose, they know the concept named in the question, they have the skills to provide answers. School finally makes sense: teachers have planned with this end in sight, the lessons led to this assessment, and the students can succeed.
And by the third week of May, students are into their final week of high school. Everyone is anticipating Friday’s graduation, and each student takes their final exam. The experience seems similar for each student: they enter the exam room and whisper excitedly “this is IT,” take a deep breath, often shrugging their shoulders, to focus on the exam, and then spend the final few minutes of the exam watching the clock tick towards the end. Maintaining their decorum, they usually have a little fist clench or raise their hands up; with a smile on my face, I read the same examination script and preserve the decorum of what is still an exam room.
After the final exam is complete and I seal the final set of exams, I also take a moment to exhale, breathing out of the work that has gone into shepherding this senior class through their two years. And usually, this happens on Thursday, which means that I can wake up Friday and simply enjoy the day.
By the end of Friday, it’s almost time for graduation: “Pomp and Circumstance,” speeches, a slideshow, and finally the awarding of the diplomas and the turning of tassels as this year’s class is announced.
And during every ceremony since my school’s first-ever graduation in 2007, which I also organized as the first Head of High School, I’ve thought for a moment about the day that my eldest daughter would graduate in May 2020, at the end of my eighteenth year at the school, at the end of her fourteenth year, and at the end of my favorite school week of the year.
A Week Like No Other
Except that’s not how it turned out.
There was no final week of classes for seniors, there were no IB exams for me to administer, and there was no graduation in the gym for my daughter. All the things that make this week special didn’t happen, the graduation that I imagined for my daughter didn’t happen.
My school’s administrators did the best they could, creating a lovely virtual graduation ceremony. And I am very proud of my daughter for recognizing that losing out on a live ceremony does not even begin to compare to those who have lost loved ones during this pandemic.
I write this as part of GMWP’s collective entry to the Wisconsin Historical Society’s COVID-19 Journal Project. As I said at the beginning of this piece, in normal times this week is bittersweet: it is the sad farewell to students that causes me happy reflections of them. But in these extraordinary times, that week never happened: one more in a countless stream of end of school year moments that never happened in the spring of 2020.
During the fall of 2001, a poet on my university campus noted that school years have a rhythm of their own, from fall through winter to spring, and that the aftermath of 9/11, among other things, would be to disrupt that year like no other. I’ve held onto that observation for almost two decades, and paid attention to the rhythm of the school year, noting how each one differs from the last but how most follow a similar tune. It’s a new song this spring, a sparse, anxious rhythm unlike any I’ve experienced before.
And one, quite frankly, that I would prefer never to hear again.
