8th Grade Graduation

Today's graduation ceremony was a touching and powerful event. My hat goes off to the students for their insightful, articulate reflections on their experiences at TBS, expressed through song, poem, story and speech. Though the themes of change that these 13-year-olds have lived through are fairly repetitious - overcoming shyness, making new friends, accepting oneself, learning what it means to truly work hard, becoming inspired by a teacher, etc - I am always amazed at how each one is able to find a unique and original approach, if not an entirely new story,  to tell about how s/he has changed during her/his time at the school.


The centerpiece of the TBS graduation event is the student presentations, which meld exhibition as an assessment device with the entire range of school-wide learning outcomes, and especially our emphasis on meta-cognition and reflection as essential skills for effective learning. This six-week unit begins with a variety of activities that help students remember and recall information about their time at TBS, starting with the creation of a timeline of their time at TBS filled with dozens of details about each year on the line. Students then move into creating Top 10 lists on various topics about their time at the school, followed by the construction of an extended metaphor ("My time at TBS has been like a ________, because __________"). This is a very public and interactive phase of the project, where students relive their younger years and share laughter and memories, and thus begin the process of moving towards closure with their time at TBS, for which the graduation event itself is merely the formal signifier.

At this point, students are ready to move into the next, more individual phase of the project, which is thinking about their own presentations. They first are asked to select a topic in response to the prompt, "What is a major way that you changed in your time at TBS?" This is followed by my personal favorite part of the project, which is a lesson on the nature of form/content relationship; by reading and discussing the poems Swan and Shadow by John Hollander and r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r by ee cummings, students learn that the form of their presentation (speech, poem, story, song, etc) should have some connection to the content of the poem, and that the two need to work in harmony to reinforce the central meaning and message of the project. Armed with this understanding, students are able to make discerning choices about how to proceed with drafting their texts, in both form and content.

Rounds and rounds of drafting, editing and revising follow, sometimes right up until the day before graduation, which is a little nerve-racking for teachers and students alike. During this last week, lessons about the actual delivery of the project are provided through watching video of, or having read-alouds of, graduation projects from previous years. Verbal and non-verbal topics including pacing, intonation, enunciation, posture, gesture, and eye contact are analyzed and discussed, and then practiced in a variety of settings, from alone to with a partner to on a live microphone. And though most students admit to being nervous before and during their presentation, the love, laughter, insight, and presence that these young adults bring to the event create an environment of joy and renewal just at the moment that we need it most.