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Welcome all to Graduatation Day
A day that seemed so far away
But now we're here
And now we fear
That we must go.

Thus began one of the ten trillion speeches delivered at the kindergartner graduation ceremony: a speech penned by yours truly, requitely stamped with a tinge of my underhanded pessimism and delivered by students who didn't know what the fuck it meant. They only knew that unholy wrath would fall upon their heads if they messed up, so they memorized and spewed at the appropriate time and the parents clapped and our showboat left the dock.

Jessica is a chronic scowler in photographs. She very much looks like she wants to assassinate Sue's ear, in the leftmost picture there, but sadly she never got the chance. There will be no more Jessica stories; the tomboy fights her gender battles elsewhere now. She's vanished, off to another hagwon, and that pisses me off because the weird kids are always the best.

I was also pseudo-mad when I saw that the kids got those rad square tasselly hats - mortarboards, I believe the lingo goes - because at our commencement last summer, a graduation from university, there were no cubic hats! There were no tassles! Looking back, I see now that we fell far short of the Perfect Memory mark: mortarboards are, I think, extremely necessary to score that elusive 100% Stereotypical Graduation Percentile. I think we should outsource our graduations to the Koreans in the future, because they know how to do these things right. Or ridiculously over the top, at least.

Ridiculousness case in point: midway through the ceremony all the staff performed a carefully choreographed dance, a dance that we had practiced for weeks in varying stages of tension. We basically had to look cool in a Rat-Packish way, despite the fact that we were doing spin tricks with plastic hats. Amusingly enough, the spectacle was set to 'Hit the Road, Jack', which is contextually paramount to telling these alumni children to get the hell out, we're done with thee. Luckily, the parents were suitably distracted by snapping fingers and elaborate footwork and Director Lifts in Tandem... plus none of them understand English. The prancing went well, but I'll never quite shake my bafflement at managerial perception that thinks an amazing day for the hagwon is a day when the teachers successfully dance like trained monkeys in bowler hats.

In the end, it was all appearance as usual, but an appearance that pulled more than the usual incredulous revulsion on my part. I felt something between sad and happy, my heart somewhere in the middle of that great grey divide between the lighthouse points of emotion that English can adequately convey.

There was everything you might expect. There were performances and songs, pomp and circumstance, flashback films and flowers. There were honkin' big head shots of all the graduating kids smiling down from above, thirteen unknowing little deities. There were pictures and pictures and video and pictures, and I felt a strange twinge when I gave each child their customized award - BEST HELPER! BEST ORAL ABILITY! - because they were so grave, so solemn and perfect in the saddest way possible.

It was something I don't think I can ever forget.

Posted by Chris at 10:26 AM >> Commentations (6)